to his ears.

As for Roland himself, the words and actions of the girl,--though they
might have awakened suspicions, not before-experienced, of her good
faith, and even appeared to show that it was less to unlucky accident
than to foul conspiracy he owed his misfortunes,--did not, and could not,
banish the despair that absorbed his mind, to the exclusion of every
other feeling. He seemed even to himself to be in a dream the sport of an
incubus, that oppressed every faculty and energy of spirit, while yet
presenting the most dreadful phantasms to his imagination. His tongue had
lost its function; he strove several times to speak, but tongue and
spirit were alike paralysed. The nightmare oppressed mind and body
together.

It was in this unhappy condition, the result of overwrought, feelings and
intolerable bodily suffering, that he was led by his Piankeshaw masters
down the hill to the river, which they appeared to be about to pass;
whilst the chief body of marauders were left to seek another road from
the field of battle. Here the old warrior descended from his horse, and
leaving Roland in charge of the two juniors, stepped a little aside to a
place where was a ledge of rocks, in the face of which seemed to be the
entrance to a cavern, although carefully blocked up by masses of stone,
that had been but recently removed from its foot. The Piankeshaw, taking
post directly in front of the hole, began to utter many mournful
ejaculations, which were addressed to the insensate rock, or perhaps to
the equally insensate corpse of a comrade concealed within. He drew also
from a little pouch,--his medicine-bag,--divers bits of bone, wood, and
feathers, the most valued idols of his _fetich_, which he scattered about
the rock, singing the while, in a highly lugubrious tone, the praises of
the dead, and shedding tears that might have been supposed the
outpourings of genuine sorrow. But if sorrow it was that thus affected
the spirits of the warrior, as it seemed to have done on several previous
occasions, it proved to be as easily consolable as before, as the event
showed; for having finished his lamentations, and left the rock, he
advanced towards Roland, whom he threatened for the third time with his
knife; when one of the younger Indians muttering a few words of
remonstrance, and pointing at the same time to the keg of fire-water on
the horse's back, his grief and rage expired together in a haw-haw, ten
times more obstreperous an