A peace-runner brings Metamora the news that Nahmeokee is a captive in the power of his enemies. Leaving fifty white men bound as hostages to secure his own safety, he starts alone to deliver her. As he approaches the English camp, he hears Nahmeokee shriek. With one bound he bursts in upon them, levels his gun, and thunders,—
"Which of you has lived too long? Dogs of white men, do you lift your hands against a woman?" "Seize him!" they cry, but shrink from his movement. "Hah!" he scornfully exclaims, "it is now a warrior who stands before you, the fire-weapon in his hands. Who, then, shall seize him? Go, Nahmeokee; I will follow thee." Then, reminding them of his hostages, he turns on his heel and departs.
He is next discovered, with a slow and heavy step, approaching his wigwam, where his rescued wife waits to receive him. He has seen that the too unequal struggle of his countrymen is hopeless, and he appears sad and gloomy. Telling Nahmeokee, who looks broken with grief, that he is weary with the strife of blood, he says, "Bring me thy little one, that I may press him to my burning heart to quiet its tumult." Without his knowledge, the child had been killed by the white men a few hours previous. The mother goes where the child is lying upon the ground, lifts the skin that covers him, points at him, and drops her head in tears. Metamora looks at the child, at the mother, stoops, and, with rapid motions, feels the little face, arms, and legs. Suppressing the start of horror and the cry of grief a white man would have given, he sinks his chin slowly upon his breast and heaves a deep sigh, and then utters the simple words, "Dead! cold!" in a tone low as if to be heard by himself alone, and sounding like the wail of a sorrow in some far-away world. Having lifted the dead child and fondled it in his bosom and laid it tenderly back, he walks slowly to the weeping Nahmeokee, places his hand on her shoulder, and says, in a soft voice quivering with the tears not suffered to mount in the eyes, "Well, is he not happy? Better that he should die by the stranger's hand than live to be his slave. Do not bow down thy head. Thou wilt see him again in the happy land of the spirits; and he will look smilingly as—as—as I do now." Here the quality of smilingness was in the tones of the voice only, while his face wore the impress of intense grief. The voice and face thus contradicting each other presented a pathos so overwhelming that it seemed as if nothing human could surpass it or resist it.
His manner now changes. Some great resolution seems to have arisen in him. His words have a tender yet ominous meaning in their inflection as he asks Nahmeokee, "Do you not fear the power of the white man? He might seize thee and bear thee off to his far country, bind those arms that have so often clasped me, and make thee his slave. We cannot fly: our foes are all about us. We cannot fight, for this [drawing his long knife] is the only weapon I have saved unbroken from the strife. It has tasted the white man's blood and reached the cold heart of the traitor. It has been our best friend, and it is now our only treasure." Here he drew her still closer, and placed her head on his bosom, and, with the long knife in his hand, pointed upwards, and with an alluring, indescribably sweet and aerial falsetto tone, painted a picture that seemed to take form and color in the very atmosphere. There was a weird dreaminess in his voice and a visionary abstractness in his gaze, as with the words "long path in the thin air," he indicated the heavenward journey of his dead child, that seemed actually to dissolve the whole scene, theatre, actor, spectators, and all, into a passing vapor, an ethereal enchantment.
"I look through the long path in the thin air, and think I see our little one borne to the land of the happy, where the fair hunting-grounds never know snows or storms, and where the immortal brave feast under the eyes of the Giver of Good. Look upward, Nahmeokee! See, thy child looks back to thee, and beckons thee to follow." Drawing her closer with his left arm, and lowering his right, he whispers, "Hark! In the distant wood I faintly hear the tread of the white men. They are upon us! The home of the happy is made ready for thee!" While this picture of fear and hope is vivid before her mind, he strikes the blow, and in an instant she is dead in his arms. He clasps her to his breast, presses his lips on her forehead, and gently places her beside the dead child. He then shudders, and draws forth the knife sheathed in her side, and kisses its blade in a sudden transport, exclaiming, "She knew no bondage to the white men. Pure as the snow she lived, free as the air she died!"
At this moment the hills are covered with the white men, pointing their rifles at his heart. "Hah!" he cries. Their leader shouts, "Metamora is our prisoner!" "No," he proudly responds, dilating with the haughtiest port of defiance. "I live, the last of my race, live to defy you still, though numbers and treachery overpower me. Come to me, come singly, come all, and this knife, which has drunk the foul blood of your nation, and is now red with the purest of mine, will feel a grasp as strong as when it flashed in the glare of your burning dwellings or was lifted terribly over the fallen in battle."
The order is given to fire upon him; and he replies, "Do so. I am weary of the world; for ye are dwellers in it. I would not turn on my heel to save my life." They shoot, and he staggers, but in his dying agonies launches on them his awful malediction:
"My curses on ye, white men! May the Great Spirit curse ye when he speaks in his war-voice from the clouds! May his words be like the forked lightnings, to blast and desolate! May the loud winds and the fierce red flames be loosed in vengeance upon ye, tigers! May the angry Spirit of the Waters in his wrath sweep over your dwellings! May your graves and the graves of your children be in the path where the red man shall tread, and may the wolf and the panther howl over your fleshless bones! I go. My fathers beckon from the green lakes and the broad hills. The Great Spirit calls me. I go,—but the curses of Metamora stay with the white men!"
He crawls painfully to the bodies of his wife and child, and, in a vain effort to kiss them, expires, with his last gasp mixing the words, "I die—my wife, my queen—my Nahmeokee!"