Blanche hurries down the drop curtain. Scene closes.
“I thought there was no talking in a pantomime,” laughed the audience.
Third Scene.
The Whole Word.
It now appears that the whiskey which Pale Face mischievously brought has wrought its dreadful work. The proud war-plume of the chief dangles ignominiously over his left ear; his copper-colored cheeks and nose are blazing red (painted with Chinese vermilion). He tries to walk; reels like a ship in a storm.
His devoted wife has certainly tried her very best to save him from this degradation; but, like any bad husband, he only hates her for it, and has made up his drunken mind to kill her. Seizing her by the yarn of the head, he is actually scalping her with the lemon-squeezer, when little Kittyleen, who can bear no more, cries out,—
“Stop, stop, you shan’t hurt my Flaxie!”
This timely interference does not save the squaw’s life, however,—or not entirely. Her head comes off,—or at any rate, the hat and the ounce of worsted. But ere she falls to rise no more, she turns—with remarkable presence of mind for a dying woman—and points to the whiskey-jug, scowling furiously at it, as if to assure the audience that it is the jug and not the lemon-squeezer that has caused her death.