for which I owe you
an apology, kind and sympathetic reader. I should have told you that a
heavy shower of rain had fallen but a few hours before the kindling of
the death-pile, which, as needs must, had left the brush-wood in better
condition for heavy smoking than for lively combustion. Had I mentioned
this circumstance in its proper place, I should have spared your tender
sensibilities somewhat by giving you something contingent to catch at as
suggestive of possible intervention. But to return.

The instant the chief, with a sweep of his eagle-like eye, had scanned
those huge, grotesque proportions, he threw up his hand with a gesture
of surprise, and a look of recognition lighted up his handsome face.
Whereupon, as if needing nothing more to tell him who had been the prime
mover in the day's outrage, and the base motive that had led to its
perpetration, he turned abruptly upon Black Thunder, where sullen and
lowering, his giantship stood with folded arms apart from the rest, and
flung at him a rebuke so withering in its scorn, so burning in its
generous indignation, that the big barbarian quailed from before it,
daunted and abashed. Then, without further ado, the chief went, and
cutting the thongs of buffalo-hide which bound the captive to the tree,
set him at liberty, and with a wave of his hand in the direction whence
the American army was approaching, said in English, "Go."

To be thus jerked back by the skirts, so to speak, from the open jaws of
death by a single savage had proved more confounding to the steadfast
mind of Big Black Burl than when but a few minutes before he was dragged
thither by twenty, insomuch that ever since the unexpected surcease of
the fiendish frolic he had continued to stare about him in a state of
bewilderment not unlike that twilight fog of thought and sense through
which he was wont to pass from sound asleep to wide awake. But no sooner
did he feel that he was foot-loose and hand-loose again than he was all
his own collected self once more, and to the welcome gesture and
friendly word thus answered: "I yi, my larky! Much obleeged to you fur
puttin' out de fire, but smoke me ag'in ef you ketch me gwine 'way from
dis holler widout Mars'er Bushie," giving a side-long roll of his big
black thumb toward his young master.

How much of this speech the chief really understood were hard to say;
but having heard it, he turned, and for a few moments earnestly regarded
the young Kentuckian whe