is tongue
clove to his mouth, his brain spun round; and such became the intensity
of his feelings, that he was suddenly bereft of sense, and fell like a
dead man to the earth, where he lay for a time, ignorant of all events
passing around, ignorant also of the duration of his insensibility.

CHAPTER XIX.

When the soldier recovered his senses, it was to wonder again at the
change that had come over the scene. The loud yells, the bitter taunts,
the mocking laughs, were heard no more; and nothing broke the silence of
the wilderness save the stir of the leaf in the breeze, and the ripple of
the river against its pebbly banks below. He glanced a moment from the
bush in which he was lying, in search of the barbarians who had lately
covered the slope of the hill, but all had vanished; captor and captive
had alike fled; and the sparrow twittering among the stunted bushes, and
the grasshopper singing in the grass, were the only living objects to be
seen. The thong was still upon his wrists, and as he felt it rankling in
his flesh, he almost believed that his savage captors, with a refinement
in cruelty the more remarkable as it must have robbed them of the sight
of his dying agonies, had left him thus bound and wounded, to perish
miserably in the wilderness alone.

This suspicion was, however, soon driven from his mind; for making an
effort to rise to his feet, he found himself suddenly withheld by a
powerful grasp, while a guttural voice muttered in his ear from behind,
with accents half angry, half exultant,--"Long-knife no move;--see how
Piankeshaw kill Long-knife's brudders!--Piankeshaw great fighting-man!"
He turned his face with difficulty, and saw, crouching among the leaves
behind him, a grim old warrior plentifully bedaubed over head and breast
with the scarlet clay of his native Wabash, his dark shining eyes bent
now upon his rifle which he held extended over Roland's body, now turned
upon Roland himself, whom he seemed to watch over with a miser's, or a
wild-cat's, affection, and now wandering away up the stony path along the
hill-side, as if in expectation of the coming of an object dearer even
than rifle or captive to his imagination.

In the confused and distracted state of his mind, Roland was as little
able to understand the expressions of the warrior as to account for the
disappearance of his murderous associates; and he would have marvelled
for what purpose he was thus concealed, among the bushes wi