mations of horror which
succeeded, Ishmael made a gesture which commanded his sons to bear the
body into the tent.

"Now," he said, turning to those who were strangers in his camp,
"nothing is left to be done, but for each to go his own road. I wish you
all well; and to you, Ellen, though you may not prize the gift, I say,
God bless you!"

Middleton, awe-struck by what he believed a manifest judgment of Heaven,
made no further resistance, but prepared to depart. The arrangements
were brief, and soon completed. When they were all ready, they took
a short and silent leave of the squatter and his family; and then the
whole of the singularly constituted party were seen slowly and silently
following the victorious Pawnee towards his distant villages.

CHAPTER XXXII

And I beseech you,
Wrest once the law, to your authority:
To do a great right, do a little wrong.
--Shakspeare.

Ishmael awaited long and patiently for the motley train of Hard-Heart
to disappear. When his scout reported that the last straggler of the
Indians, who had joined their chief so soon as he was at such a distance
from the encampment as to excite no jealousy by their numbers, had gone
behind the most distant swell of the prairie, he gave forth the order to
strike his tents. The cattle were already in the gears, and the movables
were soon transferred to their usual places in the different vehicles.
When all these arrangements were completed, the little wagon, which had
so long been the tenement of Inez, was drawn before the tent, into which
the insensible body of the kidnapper had been borne, and preparations
were evidently made for the reception of another prisoner. Then it was,
as Abiram appeared, pale, terrified, and tottering beneath a load
of detected guilt, that the younger members of the family were first
apprised that he still belonged to the class of the living. A general
and superstitious impression had spread among them, that his crime had
been visited by a terrible retribution from Heaven; and they now gazed
at him, as at a being who belonged rather to another world, than as a
mortal, who, like themselves, had still to endure the last agony before
the great link of human existence could be broken. The criminal himself
appeared to be in a state, in which the most sensitive and startling
terror was singularly combined with total ph