tenance more hideous than ever,
caused the latter to make the most furious endeavor to release
himself, while with his right and disengaged hand he struck blindly
with his knife at the uncovered throat of the Indian. But the weapon
was soon wrested from his enfeebled hands, and the Chippewa,
dexterously turning himself so as to get the body of his enemy
completely under him, now tried to scalp him alive. Weak as he was,
the young officer did not lose sight of his presence of mind.
Scarcely had the scalping knife touched his head, when it was again
withdrawn with the most horrible contortions of the whole body of
the Chippewa. Fixing his eye on the Indian's face above that he
might feast on the agony of the wretch who had just avowed himself
to be the violator of his wife, while threatening a repetition of
the outrage when the battle should be over, the Virginian had seized
the handle of the bayonet, and turned the weapon so furiously in
the wound as to cause one general laceration, the agony arising
from which could only be comprehended from the spasmodic movements
and wild bellowings of the savage. In order to free himself from
the torture he was too much distracted by pain to think of removing
by the instant death of his enemy, the Chippewa sprang suddenly
upwards, but this movement only tended to increase the torments
under which he writhed, for, as the Virginian held the handle firmly
in his grasp, the bayonet was half withdrawn, and the sharp point
forced, by the down-hanging weight of the socket, into a new
direction. Wild with revenge and pain, he was at length in the
act of raising his tomahawk to dispatch the Virginian, who had
abandoned his hold of the bayonet, when a shot came from the front
of the square, and Pee-to-tum fell dead across the bodies of both
his immediate victims. Singular to say, the ball, aimed by Captain
Headley himself at the upper part of his person, and during the
only period when the Indians could be reached without danger to
some one or other of the men, entered his brain over his injured
eye, and forced out the other.

The fall of the detested Chippewa--the head and stay of their
battle--seemed greatly to dispirit the Pottowatomies, a band of
about fifty of whom had followed them in this fierce onset. Of that
number, some fifteen had perished, both in the hand-to-hand encounter
with the immediate followers of Ronayne and several shots from the
square. On the other hand, but four of t