“If the Indians find that out, it may go hard with you. Even Tom Kyle may not be able to save you. Among the Apaches, it is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. If they accuse you, girls, of the death of the guard, deny it to the bitter end. They do not know that he is dead.”
The girls soon afterward found themselves back in their old lodge again. Then the renegade departed, after whispering a few commands to the three Indians who now guarded the captives.
Borne to the council-square, Frontier Shack was soon pinioned to the single post ever ready there for its captive, and the horrid fire-torture. The old hunter well knew his danger but flinched not, nor betrayed the least sign of uneasiness when the howling throng pressed around him.
The death of the guard immensely excited the chief Tarantulah. Who had killed the warrior? This secret he tried to wrest from Shack, but the white man only laughed in his face.
“As if I would tell, even if I knowed!” was his contemptuous answer.
“And you have been helped by some red-man in your visit to the Apache land. Who is he, that we may burn him with you?” demanded the chief, fiercely.
“What do you take me for, Indian?” cried the trapper. “A durn fool, I s’pose. When I go back on anybody, call me a craw-fish.”
Tarantulah bit his lips, and started toward his braves.
“The traitor is Gold Feather!” he cried, “and he has not been seen to-night.”
“He rode to the mountains when the Manitou’s light hung in the sky,” answered a sub-chief.