CHAPTER XXV. FATE DEALS CARDS OF BOTH COLOURS IN THE LITTLE FORT
From that brisk fight, in which Ouenwa and his twenty braves and the little garrison of Fort Beatrix defeated Panounia, Black Feather brought a confirmation of Pierre d'Antons' concern in the last attacks upon the settlement. It consisted of a sword-belt and an empty scabbard. He had torn them from the person of a tall antagonist during a brief hand-to-hand encounter. The owner of the gear had won free, Black Feather regretted to say. Sir Ralph, too, felt the escape of his enemy, and sincerely hoped that the defeat had ended his power over Panounia, and brought down that wolfish chief's hatred instead.
On the morning after the battle, the little plantation presented a busy though sombre appearance to those of its people who were in condition to view it. Along the woods and rising ground to the north, the snow and frozen soil were being hollowed to receive the bodies of those slain in the fight. The dead of the enemy had been carried far into the woods, and piled together with scant ceremony. The settlers had lost three of their number,—young Donnelly, Harding, and the younger Trigget. Four of the rescuing party were dead and wounded. Tom Bent was on his back again, and Kingswell's head was ringing like a sea-shell. William Trigget was cut about the face and sore all over; but he kept on his feet.
After the graves were chipped in the iron earth, and the shrouded bodies lowered therein and covered, the tribesmen, under Black Feather's orders, set about building themselves lodges outside the stockade. It had been decided that, for mutual support, the friendly Beothics should camp near the fort, at least for the remainder of the winter. With axes borrowed from the settlement, they soon had the forest ringing with the noise of their labour. Though they had travelled light, in their hurry to rescue the friends of Ouenwa and Black Feather, they had dragged along with them a few sled-loads of deerskins and birch bark, with which to cover their wigwams. So the shelters sprang up quickly about the torn and scorched palisades; for it was a small matter to trim the poles and fit the pliable roofs across the conical frames.
The dusk gathered over the wilderness, dimming the edges of white barren and black forest and round hill. The stars shone silver above, and the fires of the victorious men of the totem of the Bear glowed red below. In the outer room of the cabin that had been Pierre d'Antons', Beatrix sat alone by Kingswell's bed. Her eyes were on the leaping flames in the chimney, and his were on the fair lines of her averted face. The top of his head was so swathed in bandages that he looked like a turbaned Turk. Cheeks and chin were white as paper in the unstable light. His eyes were bright with a touch of fever brought on by his suffering. His mind was in a fitful mood, for a minute or two steady enough and concerned with the present and the room in which he lay, and then wandering abroad, exploring vague trails of remembrance and imagining. Sometimes he murmured words and sentences, but in such a gabbling style that his nurse could have made nothing of what was passing in his brain even if she had taken such advantage of his condition as to try.
After a long spell of uneasy mutterings, followed by a profound silence, he suddenly flung out one arm. The movement startled Beatrix from her dreaming, and she turned her face back to him from the fire.