ON THE MISTY MOUNTAIN.
CONCLUDED.
ROUTE III.
One does not feel particularly festive starting out in the rain and the dim uncertain light of the hour before day. The best thing to be done under these circumstances is to go to sleep, if you can sleep staging. The “front boot” affords a very comfortable berth, of which the lieutenant took possession. I concluded to go inside, and endeavor to snatch the shaky sleep of a coach. I felt as though I could not keep awake if the road were picketed by hostile redskins. The ladies—bless their kind souls!—sat close to make room. I sank into a corner, and was soon jolted into a sleep.
I was aroused by a sudden stoppage. The day had dawned. I looked out of the stage, and saw a wagon overturned in the road. Seeing the conductor and the lieutenant alight, I alighted. The body of a man lay by the upturned wagon.
“It’s poor Tommy!” said the lieutenant.
“I thought the thievin’, cowardly devils would git him at last,” said the conductor. “Poor old Tommy! It will be an awful blow for his wife and her six poor orphans.”
Yes! there lay poor Tommy in the early sunlight—dead, stripped, and scalped. His clothes had been torn from his body, which was gashed in every limb. Every gash, the lieutenant told me, was the sign of a different tribe. The number on poor Tommy’s body showed that representatives of seven tribes assisted at his murder. His throat was cut across—the sign of the “Cut-throats.” His arms and his thighs were crossed by deep transverse gashes. His abdomen was scored by two long gashes meeting in a point. The lieutenant told me the names of the tribes whose devilish signs-manual were written in the blood and on the flesh of poor “Tommy John,” but I have memory only of one in the horrid sight then before me.
The oxen lay with their throats cut and large pieces hacked out of their still quivering flanks. The Indians had taken everything they could use. What they did not take, with savage malignity they had broken into atoms or torn into shreds. A baby’s crib and a child’s chair which the poor fond father was taking to his little ones on the “Sandy” were broken into very chips.