.

Minutes passed. Not even the call of the catbird, broke the silence.
Within the darkness of the cabin the suspense was a thing of which
insanity is made.

"Sam!" called a voice softly.

No answer.

"Sam!" repeated more loudly.

Again no answer of voice or of action.

In the doorway appeared a woman's figure; breathless, blindly fearful.

"Sam!" for the third time, tremulous, wailing; and she stepped outside.

A second, and it was over. A second, and the revel was on. The earth was
not silent now. There was no warning trill of prairie owl. As dropped
the figures from above there broke forth the Sioux war-cry: long drawn
out, demoniac, indescribable. Blood curdling, more savage infinitely
than the cry of any wild beast, the others took it up, augmented it by a
score, a hundred throats. Again the earth vomited the demons forth.
Naked, breech-clouted, garbed in fragments of white men's dress, they
swarmed into the clearing, into the cabin, about the two prisoners in
their midst. Passively, patiently waiting for hours, of a sudden they
seemed possessed of a frenzy of haste, of savage abandon, of drunken
exhilaration in the cunning that had won the game without a shot from
the white man's gun, without the injury of a single warrior. They were
in haste, and yet they were not in haste. They looted the cabin like
fire and then fought among themselves for the plunder. They applied the
torch to the shanty's roof as though pressed by the Great Spirit; then
capered fiendishly in its illumination, oblivious of time until, tinder
dry, it had burned level with the earth. Last of all, purposely reserved
as a climax, they gave their attention to the pair of half-naked, bound
and gagged figures in their midst. Then it was the scene became an orgy
indeed. The havoc preceding had but whetted their appetite for the
finale. Savagery personified, cruelty unqualified, deadly hate,
primitive lust--every black passion lurking in the recesses of the human
mind stalked brazenly into the open, stood forth defiant, sinister,
unashamed. But let it pass. It was but a repetition of a thousand
similar scenes enacted on the swiftly narrowing frontier, a fraction of
the price civilisation ever pays to savagery, inevitable as a nation's
expansion, as its progression.

It was eight of the clock when came that final warning whistle of
prairie owl. It was not yet ten when, silent as they had come,
unbelievably impassive when but an hour before th