The old hags jeered him. They told him he had a chicken's heart, and promised themselves the pleasure of tasting it after it was torn from his living body. They spat in his face and pinched his arms to see him wince. When he was stripped quite naked, they staked him out to picket pins with rawhide bands, one to each of his four limbs.
While this was going on, the warriors, having thrown aside their blankets, appeared in the full lithe glory of their naked bodies. To the accompaniment of a strange minor chant, they circled slowly around the fire and their victim, hopping rhythmically first on one foot then on the other, stepping high, stooping low. As they passed the prostrate man, they struck their knives deep into the ground near his head, for the purpose of seeing him shrink. After a little, they became sufficiently excited, and so the tortures began.
Toward morning the squaws wrapped in a blanket the mutilated burnt carcass, and laid it on a litter which had been preparing while the torture was in progress. The litter was raised in the air to the height of ten feet, bound securely to upright poles. Man-who-speaks-Medicine had been a member of the tribe. Whatever his sins, he must have a tribal burial.
Then in the grayness of the dawn the little cavalcade filed away, like muffled phantoms, toward the east. In the sky the last stars were flickering out. On the hill top the last embers of the fire died. A bird high in the heavens piped up clearly for a moment, and was still. The breeze of morning rippled over the faintly distinguished, grasses, and stirred the drying leaves of the litter that stood like a scaffold against the sombre shadows of the Hills.
THE END.
STORIES OF RARE CHARM BY
GENE STRATTON-PORTER
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