fore the fire
kindled to burn him, and beat him with their fists and with sticks
till they had heated their rage. Then they tied his wrists together
and fastened the rope that bound them to a post strongly planted in the
ground with leash enough to let him walk round it once or twice, five or
six yards away from the fire. Girty was present, and Crawford asked if
the Indians meant to burn him; the renegade briefly answered, "Yes."
Then Captain Pipe spoke, and Wingenund saw his friend for the last time.
After this chief left Crawford, the Indians broke into a loud yell and
began the work of torture which ended only with his death.

At one point he besought Simon Girty to put an end to his sufferings;
but Girty would not, or dared not.

Then Crawford began to pray, imploring God to have mercy upon him, and
bore his torment for an hour and a half longer with manly courage. It is
not known how long his torture lasted; Knight was now taken away, and no
friend remained to witness Crawford's agony to the end.

I have thought it well to recount his story, for without it we could not
fully realize what the white people of that day underwent in their long
struggle with the Ohio Indians. Cruelty so fiendish could never have
a cause, but it cannot be denied that the torture of Crawford was the
effect of the butchery of the Christian Indians. That awful deed was an
act of even greater wickedness, for it was the act of men who were not
savage by birth or race or creed. It was against the white man's law,
while the torture of Crawford was by the red man's law. It is because
of their laws that the white men have overcome and the red men have gone
under in the order of mercy, for whenever we sin against that order,
contrary to our law, or according to our law, we weaken ourselves, and
if we continue in our sin, we doom ourselves in the end to perish.

X. THE ESCAPE OF KNIGHT AND SLOVER.

When the Indians made a raid on the settlements, they abandoned even
victory if they had once had enough fighting; as when they had a feast
they glutted themselves, and then wasted what they had not eaten. They
seemed now to have had such a surfeit of cruelty in the torture of
Crawford that they took little trouble to secure Knight for a future
holiday. They promised themselves that he should be burnt, too, at the
town of the Shawnees, but in their satiety they left him unbound in the
charge of a young Indian who was to take him there from Sand