University of Virginia Library

13. CHAPTER XIII.

The night was even darker than before, the fire
of the Wyandotts on the square had burned so
low as no longer to send even a ray to the hut of
Wenonga, and the wind, though subsiding, still
kept up a sufficient din to drown the ordinary
sound of footsteps. Under such favourable circumstances,
Nathan (for, as may be supposed, it
was this faithful friend who had snatched the forlorn
Edith from the grasp of the betrayer,) stalked
boldly from the hut, bearing the rescued maiden
in his arms, and little doubting, that, having thus
so successfully accomplished the first and greatest
step in the enterprise, he could now conclude it in
safety, if not with ease.

But there were perils yet to be encountered,
which the man of peace had not taken into anticipation,
and which, indeed, would not have existed,
had his foreboding doubts of the propriety of admitting
either of his associates, and honest Stackpole
especially, to a share of the exploit, been suffered
to influence his counsels to the exclusion of
that worthy but unlucky personage altogether.
He had scarce stepped from the tent-door, before
there arose on the sudden, and at no great distance
from the square over which he was hurrying
his precious burthen, a horrible din,—a stamping,
snorting, galloping and neighing of horses, as
if a dozen famished bears or wolves had suddenly
made their way into the Indian pin-fold, carrying

death and distraction into the whole herd. And
this alarming omen was almost instantly followed
by an increase of all the uproar, as if the animals
had broken loose from the pound, and were rushing,
mad with terror, towards the centre of the
village.

At the first outbreak of the tumult, Nathan had
dropped immediately into the bushes before the
wigwam; but perceiving that the sounds increased,
and were actually drawing nigh, and that the
sleepers were waking on the square, he sprang
again to his feet, and, flinging his blanket around
Edith, who was yet incapable of aiding herself,
resolved to make a bold effort to escape, while
darkness and the confusion of the enemy permitted.
There was, in truth, not a moment to be
lost. The slumbers of the barbarians, proverbially
light at all times, and readily broken even when
the stupor of drunkenness has steeped their faculties,
were not proof against sounds at once so
unusual and so uproareous. A sudden yell of surprise,
bursting from one point, was echoed by another,
and another voice; and, in a moment, the
square resounded with these signals of alarm, added
to the wilder screams which some of them set
up, of “Long knives! Long-knives!” as if the savages
supposed themselves suddenly beset by a
whole army of charging Kentuckians.

It was at this moment of dismay and confusion,
that Nathan rose from the earth, and, all other
paths being now cut off, darted across a corner of
the square towards the river, which was in a
quarter opposite to that whence the sounds came,
in hopes to reach the alder-thicket on its banks,
before being observed. And this, perhaps, he
would have succeeded in reaching, had not Fortune,
which seemed this night to give a loose to

all her fickleness, prepared a new and greater
difficulty.

As he rose from the bushes, some savage, possessed
of greater presence of mind than his fellows,
cast a decaying brand from the fire into the heap
of dried grass and maize-husks, designed for their
couches, which, bursting immediately into a furious
flame, illuminated the whole square and village,
and revealed, as it was designed to do, the
cause of the wondrous uproar. A dozen or more
horses were instantly seen galloping into the square,
followed by a larger and denser herd behind,
all agitated by terror, all plunging, rearing, prancing
and kicking, as if possessed by a legion of evil
spirits, though driven, as was made apparent by
the yells which the Indians set up on seeing him,
by nothing more than the agency of a human
being.

At the first flash of the flames, seizing upon the
huge bed of straw, and whirling up in the gust in
a prodigious volume, Nathan gave up all for lost,
not doubting that he would be instantly seen and
assailed. But the spectacle of their horses dashing
madly into the square, with the cause of the
tumult seen struggling among them, in the apparition
of a white-man, sitting aloft, entangled inextricably
in the thickest of the herd, and evidently
borne forward with no consent of his own, was
metal more attractive for Indian eyes; and Nathan
perceived that he was not only neglected in
the confusion by all, but was likely to remain so,
long enough to enable him to put the thicket betwixt
him and the danger of discovery.

“The knave has endangered us, and to the value
of the scalp on his own foolish head;” muttered
Nathan, his indignation speaking in a voice
louder than a whisper: “but, truly, he will pay the

price: and, truly, his loss is the maiden's redeeming!”

He darted forwards as he spoke; but his words
had reached the ears of one, who, cowering like
himself among the weeds around Wenonga's hut,
now started suddenly forth, and displayed to his
eyes the young Virginian, who, rushing eagerly
up, clasped the rescued captive in his arms, crying,
—“Forward now, for the love of Heaven! forward,
forward!”

“Thee has ruined all!” cried Nathan, with bitter
reproach, as Edith, rousing from insensibility at
the well known voice, opened her eyes upon her
kinsman, and, all unmindful of the place of meeting,
unconscious of every thing but his presence,
—the presence of him whose supposed death she
had so long lamented,—sprang to his embrace
with a cry of joy that was heard over the whole
square, a tone of happiness, pealing above the rush
of the winds and the uproar of men and animals.
“Thee has ruined all,—theeself and the maid!
Save thee own life!”

With these words, Nathan strove to tear Edith
from his grasp, to make one more effort for her
rescue; and Roland, yielding her to his superior
strength, and perceiving that a dozen Indians were
running against them, drew his tomahawk, and,
with a self-devotion which marked his love, his
consciousness of error, and his heroism of character,
waved Nathan away, while he himself
rushed back upon the pursuers, not so much, however,
in the vain hope of disputing the path, as, by
laying down his life on the spot, to purchase one
more hope of escape to his Edith.

The act, so unexpectedly, so audaciously bold,
drew a shout of admiration from throats which
had before only uttered yells of fury: but it was

mingled with fierce laughter, as the savages, without
hesitating at, or indeed seeming at all to regard,
his menacing position, ran upon him in a
body, and avoiding the only blow they gave him
the power to make, seized and disarmed him,—a
result that, notwithstanding his fierce and furious
struggles, was effected in less space than we have
taken to describe it. Then, leaving him in the
hands of two of their number, who proceeded to
bind him securely, the others rushed after Nathan,
who, though encumbered by his burthen, again inanimate,
her arms clasped around his neck, as
they had been round that of her kinsman, made
the most desperate exertions to bear her off, seeming
to regard her weight no more than if the burthen
had been a cushion of thistle-down. He ran
for a moment with astonishing activity, leaping
over bush and gully, where such crossed his path,
with such prodigious strength and suppleness of
frame, as to the savages appeared little short of
miraculous; and, it is more than probable he
might have effected his escape, had he chosen to
abandon the helpless Edith. As it was, he, for a
time, bade fair to make his retreat good. He
reached the low thicket that fringed the river, and
one more step would have found him in at least
temporary security. But that step was never to
be taken. As he approached, two tall barbarians
suddenly sprang from the cover, where they had
been taking their drunken slumbers; and, responding
with exulting whoops to the cries of the
others, they leaped forward to secure him. He
turned aside, running downwards to where a
lonely wigwam, surrounded by trees, offered the
concealment of its shadow. But he turned too
late; a dozen fierce wolf-like dogs, rushing from
the cabin, and emboldened by the cries of the pursuers,
rushed upon him, hanging to his skirts, and
entangling his legs, rending and tearing all the
while, so that he could fly no longer. The Indians
were at his heels: their shouts were in his ears;
their hands were almost upon his shoulders. He
stopped, and turning towards them, with a gesture
and look of desperate defiance, and still more desperate
hatred, exclaimed,—“Here, devils! cut and
hack! your time has come, and I am the last of
them!” And holding Edith at the length of his
arm, he pulled open his garment, as if to invite the
death-stroke.

But his death, at least at that moment, was not
sought after by the Indians. They seized him,
and, Edith being torn from his hands, dragged
him, with endless whoops, towards the fire, whither
they had previously borne the captured Roland,
over whom, as over himself, they yelled their
triumph; while screams of rage, from those who
had dashed among the horses after the daring
white-man who had been seen among them, and
the confusion that still prevailed, showed that he
also had fallen into their hands.

The words of defiance which Nathan breathed
at the moment of yielding, were the last he uttered.
Submitting passively to his fate, he was
dragged onwards by a dozen hands, a dozen voices
around him vociferating their surprise at his appearance
even more energetically than the joy
of their triumph. His Indian habiliments and
painted body evidently struck them with astonishment,
which increased as they drew nearer the
fire and could better distinguish the extraordinary
devices he had traced so carefully on his breast
and visage. Their looks of inquiry, their questions
jabbered freely in broken English as well as
in their own tongue, Nathan regarded no more

than their taunts and menaces, replying to these,
as to all, only with a wild and haggard stare,
which seemed to awe several of the younger
warriors, who began to exchange looks of peculiar
meaning. At last, as they drew nearer the
fire, an old Indian staggered among the group,
who made way for him with a kind of respect, as
was, indeed, his due,—for he was no other than
the old Black-Vulture himself. Limping up to the
prisoner, with as much ferocity as his drunkenness
would permit, he laid one hand upon his
shoulder, and with the other aimed a furious
hatchet-blow at his head. The blow was arrested
by the renegade, Doe, or Atkinson, who made
his appearance at the same time with Wenonga,
and muttered some words in the Shawnee tongue,
which seemed meant to soothe the old man's
fury.

“Me Injun-man!” said the chief, addressing
his words to the prisoner, and therefore in the
prisoner's language,—“Me kill all white-man!
Me Wenonga: me drink white-man blood! me
no heart!” And to impress the truth of his words
on the prisoner's mind, he laid his right hand,
from which the axe had been removed, as well as
his left, on Nathan's shoulder, in which position
supporting himself, he nodded and wagged his
head in the other's face, with as savage a look of
malice as he could infuse into his drunken features.
To this the prisoner replied by bending
upon the chief a look more hideous than his own,
and indeed so strangely unnatural and revolting,
with lips so retracted, features so distorted by
some nameless passion, and eyes gleaming with
fires so wild and unearthly, that even Wenonga,
chief as he was, and then in no condition to be
daunted by any thing, drew slowly back, remov

ing his hands from the prisoner's shoulder, who
immediately fell down in horrible convulsions, the
foam flying from his lips, and his fingers clenching
like spikes of iron into the flesh of two Indians
that had hold of him.

Taunts, questions, and whoops were heard no
more among the captors, who drew aside from
their wretched prisoner, as if from the darkest of
their Manitoes, all looking on with unconcealed
wonder and awe. The only person, indeed, who
seemed undismayed at the spectacle, was the
renegade, who, as Nathan shock and writhed in
the fit, beheld the corner of a piece of parchment
projecting from the bosom of his shirt, and
looking vastly like that identical instrument he had
seen but an hour or two before in the hands of
Braxley. Stooping down, and making as if he
would have raised the convulsed man in his arms,
he drew the parchment from its hiding-place,
and, unobserved by the Indians, transferred it to
a secret place in his own garments. He then
rose up, and stood like the rest, looking upon the
prisoner, until the fit had passed off, which it did
in but a few moments, Nathan starting to his feet,
and looking around him in the greatest wildness,
as if, for a moment, not only unconscious of what
had befallen him, but even of his captivity.

But unconsciousness of the latter calamity was
of no great duration, and was dispelled by the old
chief saying, but with looks of drunken respect,
that had succeeded his insane fury—“My brudder
great-medicine white-man! great white-man
medicine! Me Wenonga, great Injun-captain,
great kill-man-white-man, kill-all-man, man-man,
squaw-man, little papoose-man! Me make medicine-man
brudder-man! Medicine-man tell Wenonga
all Jibbenainosay?—where find Jibbenainosay?

how kill Jibbenainosay? kill white-man's
devil-man! Medicine-man tell Injun-man why
medicine-man come Injun town? steal Injun prisoner?
steal Injun hoss? Me Wenonga,—me
good brudder medicine-man.”

This gibberish, with which he seemed, besides
expressing much new-born good will, to intimate
that its cause lay in the belief that the prisoner
was a great white conjuror, who could help him
to a solution of sundry interesting questions, the
old chief pronounced with much solemnity and
suavity; and he betrayed an inclination to continue
it, the captors of Nathan standing by and
looking on with vast and eager interest. But a
sudden and startling yell from the Indians who
had charge of the young Virginian, preceded by
an exclamation from the renegade who had stolen
among them, upset the curiosity of the party,—or
rather substituted a new object for admiration,
which set them all running towards the fire,
where Roland lay bound. The cause of the excitement
was nothing less than the discovery
which Doe had just made, of the identity of the
prisoner with Roland Forrester, whom he had
with his own hands delivered into those of the
merciless Piankeshaws, and whose escape from
them and sudden appearance in the Shawnce village
were events just as wonderful to the savages
as the supposed powers of the white medicine-man,
his associate.

But there was still a third prodigy to be wondered
at. The third prisoner was dragged from
among the horses to the fire, where he was almost
immediately recognised by half a dozen different
warriors, as the redoubted and incorrigible
horse-thief, Captain Stackpole. The wonderful
conjuror, and the wonderful young Long-knife,

who was one moment a captive in the hands of
Piankeshaws on the banks of the Wabash, and,
the next, an invader of a Shawnee village in the
valley of the Miami, were both forgotten: the
captain of horse-thieves was a much more wonderful
person,—or, at the least, a much more important
prize. His name was howled aloud, and
in a moment became the theme of every tongue;
and he was instantly surrounded by every man in
the village,—we may say, every woman and child
too, for the alarm had brought the whole village
into the square; and the shrieks of triumph, the
yells of unfeigned delight with which all welcomed
a prisoner so renowned and so detested, produced
an uproar ten times greater than that
which gave the alarm.

It was indeed Stackpole, the zealous and unlucky
slave of a mistress whom it was his fate to
injure and wrong in every attempt he made to
serve her; and who had brought himself and his
associates to their present bonds by merely toiling
on the present occasion too hard in her service.
It seems,—for so he was used himself to
tell the tale,—that he entered the Indian pound
with the resolution to fulfil Bloody Nathan's instructions
to the letter; and he accordingly selected
four of the best animals of the herd, which
he succeeded in haltering without difficulty or
noise. Had he paused here, he might have retreated
with his prizes without fear of discovery.
But the excellence of the opportunity,—the best
he had ever had in his life,—the excellence, too,
of the horses, thirty or forty in number, “the
primest and beautifullest critturs,” he averred,
“what war ever seed in a hoss-pound,” with a
notion which now suddenly beset his grateful
brain, namely, that by carrying off the whole

herd he could “make anngelliferous madam rich
in the item of hoss-flesh,” proved too much for
his philosophy and his judgment; and after holding
a council of war in his own mind, he came to
a resolution “to steal the lot.”

This being determined upon, he imitated the
example of magnanimity lately set him by Nathan,
stripped off and converted his venerable
wrap-rascal into extemporary halters, and so
made sure of half a dozen more of the best
horses; with which, and the four first selected,
not doubting that the remainder of the herd would
readily follow at their heels, he crept from the
fold, to make his way up the valley, and round
among the hills, to the rendezvous. But that was
a direction in which, as he soon learned to his
cost, neither the horses he had in hand, nor those
that were to follow in freedom, had the slightest
inclination to go; and there immediately ensued
a struggle between the stealer and the stolen,
which, in the space of a minute or less, resulted
in the whole herd making a demonstration towards
the centre of the village, whither they succeeded
both in carrying themselves and the
vainly resisting horse-thief, who was borne along
on the backs of those he had haltered, like a
land-bird on the bosom of a torrent, incapable
alike of resisting or escaping the flood.

In this manner, he was taken in a trap of his
own making, as many a better and wiser man of
the world has been, and daily is; and it was no
melioration of his distress to think he had whelmed
his associates in his ruin, and defeated the best
and last hopes of his benefactress. It was with
such feelings at his heart, that he was dragged up
to the fire, to be exulted over and scolded at as long
as it should seem good to his captors. But the

latter, exhausted by the day's revels, and satisfied
with their victory, so complete and so bloodless,
soon gave over tormenting him, resolving
however that he should be soundly beaten at the
gantelope on the morrow, for the especial gratification,
and in honour, of the Wyandott party, their
guests.

This resolution being made, he was, like Roland
and Nathan, led away bound, each being bestowed
in a different hut, where they were committed
to safer guards than had been appointed to
watch over Edith; and, in an hour after, the village
was again wrapped in repose. The last to
betake themselves to their rest were Doe, and his
confederate, Braxley, the latter of whom had been
released from his disagreeable bonds, when Edith
was carried back to the tent. It was while following
Doe to his cabin, that he discovered the
loss of the precious document upon the possession
of which he had built so many stratagems, and so
many hopes of success. His agitation and confusion
were so great at the time of Nathan's assault,
that he was wholly unaware it had been taken
from him by this assailant; and Doe, to whom its
possession opened newer and bolder prospects, and
who had already formed a design for using it to
his own advantage, affected to believe that he had
dropped it on the way, and would easily recover
it on the morrow, as no Indian could possibly attach
the least value to it.

Another subject of agitation to Braxley, was the
reappearance of his rival; who, however, Doe assured
him, was “now as certainly a dead man as
if twenty bullets had been driven through his
body.”—“He is in the hands of the Old Vulture,”
said he, grimly, “and he will burn in fire jist as

sure as we will, Dick Braxley, when the devil gits
us!—that is, unless we ourselves save him.”

“We, Jack!” said the other with a laugh: “and
yet who knows how the wind may blow you? But
an hour ago you were as remorseful over the lad's
supposed death, as you are now apparently indifferent
what befalls him.”

“It is true,” replied Doe, coolly: “but see the
difference! When the Piankeshaws were burning
him,—or when I thought the dogs were at it,—it
was a death of my making for him: it was I that
helped him to the stake. But here the case is altered.
He comes here on his own hook; the Injuns
catch him on his own hook; and, d—n them,
they'll burn him on his own hook! and so it's no
matter of my consarning. There's the root of it!”

This explanation satisfied his suspicious ally;
and having conversed awhile longer on what appeared
to them most wonderful and interesting in
the singular attempt at the rescue, the two retired
to their repose.