rt of the man. Other and fiercer tortures
were devised by the chief, who stood over him, pointing out where and
how the keenest pain could be given, the bitterest pang inflicted on
that burned and broken body. At last it seemed no longer a man, but a
bleeding, scorched, mutilated mass of flesh that hung to the stake;
only the lips still breathed defiance and the eyes gleamed deathless
hate. Looking upon one and another, he boasted of how he had slain
their friends and relatives. Many of his boasts were undoubtedly
false, but they were very bitter.

"It was by my arrow that you lost your eye," he said to one; "I
scalped your father," to another; and every taunt provoked
counter-taunts accompanied with blows.

At length he looked at Snoqualmie,--a look so ghastly, so disfigured,
that it was like something seen in a horrible dream.

"I took your sister prisoner last winter; you never knew,--you thought
she had wandered from home and was lost in a storm. We put out her
eyes, we tore out her tongue, and then we told her to go out in the
snow and find food. Ah-h-h! you should have seen her tears as she went
out into the storm, and----"

The sentence was never finished. While the last word lingered on his
lips, his body sunk into a lifeless heap under a terrific blow, and
Snoqualmie put back his blood-stained tomahawk into his belt.

"Shall we kill the other?" demanded the warriors, gathering around the
surviving Bannock, who had been a stoical spectator of his companion's
sufferings. A ferocious clamor from the women and children hailed the
suggestion of new torture; they thronged around the captive, the
children struck him, the women abused him, spat upon him even, but not
a muscle of his face quivered; he merely looked at them with stolid
indifference.

"Kill him, kill him!" "Stretch him on red hot stones!" "We will make
_him_ cry!"

Snoqualmie hesitated. He wished to save this man for another purpose,
and yet the Indian blood-thirst was on him; chief and warrior alike
were drunken with fury, mad with the lust of cruelty.

As he hesitated, a white man clad in the garb of an Indian hunter
pushed his way through the crowd. Silence fell upon the throng; the
clamor of the women, the fierce questioning of the warriors ceased.
The personality of this man was so full of tenderness and sympathy, so
strong and commanding, that it impressed the most savage nature. Amid
the silence, he came and looked first at the dead body