The day had but an hour to live.
Already gray shadows were stealing among the trees, and from the lake there came the mutterings of a storm.
It was the evening that followed the morn upon which transpired the final scenes of the foregoing chapter.
A tall, middle-aged Indian stood beside a tree, around whose trunk lay the half-devoured carcasses of a dozen dogs. The limbs of some, the head and entrails of others were gone, and all presented a horrible sight to the chief.
If the features of the Indian were not recognizable in the dusk, the head-dress of gray owl-tails at once proclaimed him Hondurah.
He seemed to have taken a leap of twenty years in a single day, for he was looked upon now as the father of a traitress, not as the chief of the great North-western nation. Then he had punished several of the lying chiefs by stripping them of every insignia of rank, heedless of the vengeful scowls they gave him, seemingly not fearing the secret arrow of the future.
“I will go to my unfaithful spawn,” he cried, drowning the taunts of the derisive women. “I will show you that Hondurah can punish his child. I will not return until I can fling at your feet the black scalp of Clearwater.”
Then he plunged into the forest, and his first halt was that executed at the spot where the half-starved Indian dogs attacked Doc Cromer. Hondurah knew nothing of the assault; but he saw that a large number of the dogs had fallen before a knife, and for many minutes he searched the ground around the tree.
During this search he discovered that a party of six Indians had rushed upon the brutes, and, while framing other conclusions, he picked up a white man’s ear!
It was a terrible trophy, and the chief smiled grimly as he turned it over and over in his hand before wrapping it in buck-skin and depositing it in his medicine-bag.