“Die! Simon Girty!” he hissed, as his sight flitted along the glistening barrel.
Instantly a sharp report rent the morning air, and, with a shriek, Simon Girty dropped his rifle, and fell forward to the earth, where he lay motionless.
CHAPTER XIX.
A CHANGE IN AFFAIRS.
Jim Girty neither felt nor expressed contrition for his fratricidal deed. With folded arms he gazed calmly, almost triumphantly, upon his fallen brother, whom he believed dead—pierced through the head by his ball.
“I’ll teach you, Simon Girty, how to disobey me!” he at length hissed, in the silence that reigned after the commission of the dark crime. “You are my brother, but I care not for that, though I know that for this act I must fly the Shawnee nation before Tecumseh comes back. Ha! by heavens! did he move?”
He thought he detected a movement indicative of returning life in his brother Simon, and, throwing his rifle above his head, he strode forward with the intention of completing the deed of blood.
But the movement—the convulsive action of Simon’s arm—had been noticed by the savages, and several sprung to his side far in advance of his impetuous brother.
The foremost Shawnee, a chief of no mean distinction, jerked the renegade to his feet, and the eyelids parted, to display eyes wandering, like lost comets, in their gory sockets.
With clubbed rifle, Jim Girty reached the spot to be hurled to the earth by an Indian, and a moment later he found himself being swiftly borne to the prison lodge, his limbs bound with deer-sinews.
He knew that Simon’s heart, like his own, possessed no brotherly feeling, and that when the painted renegade came to his senses, he would wreak his vengeance upon his own lovely captive and himself.