The Indians made no noisy demonstration over the surrender of the whites, but their lowering looks boded ill for their captives; and Doc Bell’s acute senses heard the younger warriors whispering about dull knives, and he saw them mimicking the flaying process with fiendish contortions of face and form.
But he did not communicate his observations to his fellow-prisoners; he would not horrify them with their doom.
The pale-faces were soon bound, and the victors turned their faces toward Cahokia creek again.
The trader found that the bullet in his thigh did not impede his progress, and flinging pain to the winds, he managed to keep pace with the savages.
Big Fox-Fire and the fallen braves were borne before the party, and when the spot where the council had convened the preceding night was reached, the band halted, and the giant looked around for the haunted trader.
But that personage was not visible.
“He drowned in the stream!” he muttered, to himself. “Well, he is out of the world at any rate, an’ I calculate as how the world is the gainer.”
Almost immediately after the halt the captives were bound to separate trees, and the savages coolly proceeded to discuss their morning meal.
“I’m as hungry as a wolf!” growled Doc Bell, throwing a wistful look upon the huge slices of venison that surmounted the sticks which the Indians held over the blaze. “I could gnaw my moccasins, an’ get a good meal out ov an Injun’s scalp-lock. Ha! here’s comes a slice. Beavers!”
An Indian near six feet in hight, and as straight as an Assiniboin arrow, whose raven hair covered his otherwise naked shoulders, had risen from the fire, and was approaching the hunter with a huge slice of roasted venison.