"A crimson river of warm blood like to a bubbling fountain
stirr'd with wind."
--_Titus Andronicus._
To understand the horrible scene that met the view, first of the
commanding officer, and subsequently of the little square, it will
be necessary to go back to certain events of the past half hour.
When Captain Wells had returned from delivering over his wounded
niece to the charge of Black Partridge and Winnebeg, both of whom
had, with deep sorrow, beheld the fiendish excesses of their young
men, but without being able to prevent them, he was pursuing
his way across the sandhill to the assistance of Captain Headley.
Suddenly, while looking around to find out in what part of the
field his Miamis were, he saw several Pottowatomies approach the
spot where the baggage wagons were drawn up, and commence tomahawking
the children. The cries and shrieks of the mothers, as the helpless
victims perished one after the other, under their eyes, until nearly
a dozen had fallen, brought with it all the renewal of the horror
he ever experienced when women and children were the assailed, and
drove him almost frantic.
"Is that your game?" he exclaimed furiously in their own
language!--"thank God, we can play at that too."
The attempt to check the strong party assembled round the wagons,
he felt would be unavailing, but resolving to venture, single-handed,
into the encampment of the enemy, where their children had been
left unguarded, he turned his horse's head, dashed past the fort
again at his fullest speed, and with revenge and a threat of
retaliation racking his very heart strings, made for their wigwams.
Alarmed, in turn, for the safety of their squaws and children, the
murderers now desisted from their work and followed as vapidly as
they could on foot, the flight of the Miami leader. Every now and
then they stopped and fired, but at the outset all their shots were
in vain, for the captain, accustomed to that sort of warfare,
throwing himself along the neck of his horse, loading and firing
in that position, baffled all their attempts to bring him down,
while he waved his tomahawk on high, as if in triumph at the
successful issue of what he meditated. As the pursuing Indians
passed the gate of the fort, now filled with plunderers, many
intoxicated, Pee-to-tum, who had been there from the first--his
love of drink being even stronger than his thirst for revenge--came
staggering forth, suddenly aroused to a consciousness of what was
going on without, and demanded to know the cause of this new and
immediate tumult. The young Indians hastily informed him; when the
Chippewa, dropping on one knee, and holding his ramrod as a rest
upon the ground, ran his right and uninjured eye along the sight,
pulled the trigger, and brought down the horse of the fugitive,
which fell with a heavy plunge. A tremendous shout followed from
the band who had lost, four warriors by his fire, and who,
consequently deeply enraged, now made the greatest efforts to come
up with and secure him. Before he could disengage himself from his
horse, under which he lay severely wounded himself, two other
Indians came up from an opposite quarter, and, taking him prisoner,
sought to bear him off before the others could reach him. These
were the chiefs Waubansee and Winnebeg, the latter of whom, seeing
the danger of the captain from the moment when the massacre of the
children commenced, had left Mrs. Headley and Mrs. Elmsley under
the care of Black Partridge, and hastened to be of service to him
if possible. But all their efforts to save him were vain. With
rapid strides, and shouts rendered more savage than ever by the
fumes of the liquor he had swallowed, and with the scalp of the
unfortunate Von Voltenberg--who had been killed while returning to
the fort for a small flask of brandy which he had forgotten--dangling
at his side, Pee-to-tum advanced with furious speed, and, stabbing
the captain in the back, put an end to his misery. No sooner had
he fallen, than, like a vulture, the Chippewa sprang upon the
lifeless body, and, making an incision with his knife upon the
strong and full-haired crown, tore the reeking covering away,
and thus added another trophy to his disgusting spoils. This was
the signal for further outrage, Exasperated by the knowledge of
the revenge he had meditated, and the loss he had already occasioned
them, the warriors who had first followed the ill-fated Miami
leader, cut open the left side with their knives, and tore forth
the yet warm and bleeding heart, which, as well as the body itself,
they bore back in triumph to the very spot whence they had set out,
Pee-to-tum carrying his heart, pierced by the ramrod, as it protruded
a couple of feet from the barrel of his rifle.
Squatted in a circle, and within a few feet of the wagon in which
the tomahawked children lay covered with blood, and fast stiffening
in the coldness of death, now sat about twenty Indians, with
Pee-to-tum at their head, passing from hand to hand the quivering
heart of the slain man, whose eyes, straining, as it were, from
their sockets, seemed to watch the horrid repast in which they were
indulging, while the blood streamed disgustingly over their chins
and lips, and trickled over their persons. So many wolves or tigers
could not have torn away more voraciously with their teeth, or
smacked their lips with greater delight in the relish of human
food, than did these loathsome creatures, who now moistened the
nauseous repast from a black bottle of rum which had been found in
one of the wagons containing the medicine for the sick--and what
gave additional disgust was the hideous aspect of the inflamed eye
of the Chippewa, from which the bandage had fallen off, and from
which the heat of the sun's rays was fast drawing a briny, ropy,
and copious discharge, resembling rather the grey and slimy mucus
of the toad than the tears of a human being.
At the moment when the little square thus reappeared unexpectedly
before them, the revellers, who had supposed them either in the
hollow below, or long since disposed of by their comrades, were
almost instantly sobered and on their feet. Quickly they flew to
secure their guns, which lay at a little distance behind them; but,
before they could reach them, a volley from the front face of the
square was poured in with an effect which, at that short distance,
could not fail to prove destructive; and of the twenty Indians who
had composed the circle, more than a dozen of them fell dead, or
so desperately wounded, that they could not crawl off the ground.
"Good, men!" shudderingly remarked Capt. Headley, "we have revenged
this slaughter at least. Cease firing. Pull not another trigger
until I order you. If there be a hope left for us, it must depend
wholly upon our coolness. What a pity you missed that scoundrel
Pee-to-tum. Hark, Elmsley, do you hear his brutal voice calling
upon the Indians to renew the attack!"--and then in a lower tone
to the same officer: "What can have become of our wives? Yonder
rides a Pottowatomie mounted on Mrs. Headley's charger. I pray
God they may not have made them prisoners!"
"Heaven grant it may be so, sir!" solemnly returned his subaltern;
"but, in their present exasperated state, I fear the worst. Why,
while we were in the hollow, I distinctly saw Mrs. Headley bring
down two Indians with her rifle. They would not easily forget that."
"And I, sir," said Sergeant Nixon deferentially, as if fearing to
intrude, "saw Mrs. Elmsley's horse shot under her; and when an
Indian came up and struggled with her, she threw her arm around
his neck, and presented and fired a pistol at him, and then tried
to get at his scalping knife which was suspended over his
chest. What the result was, I could not make out; but the last I
saw of her, she was seized by another Indian and carried in his
arms across the very spot where we now stand. See, sir, that is
her horse!" and he pointed to the animal, which lay only a few feet
from the square, and which, among the dead bodies of soldiers,
Pottowatomies, and Miamis, had hitherto escaped their attention.
"See, sir, they are collecting in great force near the gate,"
observed the lieutenant--"I can distinctly see Pee-to-tum, who has
joined them, motioning with his hand to advance."
"Then is this the best position we could have chosen," returned
Captain Headley; "courage, men! A taste of biscuit from your
haversacks while you have time, a teaspoonful of rum, and then we
must at it again. Mind, above all things, that you keep cool, and
do not fire a shot without orders."
From the moment that Ronayne had placed himself, with the colors,
at the head of the little party when advancing up the sandhill, he
had not spoken a word, but continued to gaze fixedly and abstractedly
upon that part of the plain or prairie which led to the inner
encampment of the Indians. His whole thought--his undivided
attention was given to his wife, whose anxiety, nay, anguish, at
hearing the sounds of conflict which denoted his imminent peril,
he knew must be intense. True, he himself was spared the anxiety
and uncertainty which filled the breasts of his comrades on seeing
those they loved best on earth exposed to all the fearful chance
of battle, but even in that there was an excitement which in some
degree compensated for the risks they ran. The very fact of their
presence had sustained them; but now that the final result seemed
no longer doubtful, and that the annihilation of the whole party
was to be momentarily expected, he felt that one last look, one
last embrace of her he loved, would rob death of half its horrors.
But this was but the momentary selfishness of the man. When Mrs.
Headley and Mrs. Elmsley were known to have disappeared, he more
than ever rejoiced in the circumstances which had removed his
beloved wife from the horrors of the day, and placed her under so
faithful a guardianship as that of the generous Wau-nan-gee.
But there was another reason for the calm, the serious silence
which the Virginian had preserved. Independently of the aching
interest he took in all that he supposed to be passing at that
moment in the mind of his absent wife, he had been deeply galled
by the last insulting remark of Captain Headley, to which he had,
it is true, replied in a similar spirit, yet which nevertheless
had continued to give him much annoyance. His duty as bearer of
the colors being rather passive than active, he had not found it
necessary to open his lips, except to utter a few words of
encouragement and approval to the men. Formed in hollow square, as
the little force now was, there was no opportunity for display of
individual or personal prowess, or he certainly would have sought
an opportunity to test with his commanding officer the extent of
their respective daring. But now an occasion at last presented
itself, and in a manner least expected.