hile Roland gazed upon the spectacle, amazed, and wondering in what
manner the wretched being had met his death, which must have happened
very recently, and whilst his party was within the sound of a rifle-shot,
he observed a shudder to creep over the apparently lifeless frame; the
fingers relaxed their grasp of the earth, and then clutched it again with
violence; a broken, strangling rattle came from the throat; and a spasm
of convulsion seizing upon every limb, it was suddenly raised a little
upon one arm, so as to display the countenance, covered with blood, the
eyes retroverted into their orbits, and glaring with the sightless
whites. It was a horrible spectacle,--the last convulsion of many that
had shaken the wretched and insensible, yet still suffering clay, since
it had received the death-stroke. The spasm was the last, and but
momentary; yet it sufficed to raise the body of the mangled barbarian, so
far that, when the pang that excited it suddenly ceased, and, with it,
the life of the sufferer, the body rolled over on the back, and thus lay,
exposing to the eyes of the lookers-on two gashes, wide and gory, on the
breast, traced by a sharp knife and a powerful hand, and, as it seemed,
in the mere wantonness of a malice and lust of blood which even death
could not satisfy. The sight of these gashes answered the question Roland
had asked of his own imagination; they were in the form of a _cross_; and
as the legend, so long derided, of the forest-fiend recurred to his
memory, he responded, almost with a feeling of superstitious awe, to the
trembling cry of Telie Doe:--

"It is the Jibbenainosay!" she exclaimed, staring upon the corse with
mingled horror and wonder:--"Nick of the Woods is up again in the
forest!"

CHAPTER XI.

There was little really superstitious in the temper of Captain Forrester;
and however his mind might be at first stirred by the discovery of a
victim of the redoubted fiend so devoutly believed in by his host of the
preceding evening, it is certain that his credulity was not so much
excited as his surprise. He sprang from his horse and examined the body,
but looked in vain for the mark of the bullet that had robbed it of life.
No gun-shot wound, at least none of importance, appeared in any part.
There was, indeed, a bullet-hole in the left shoulder, and, as it seemed,
very recently inflicted: but it was bound up with leaves and vulnerary
herbs, in the usual Indian way, showing that i