Heaven knows what wrought on me to speak like this, I, a poor, broken fellow, face to face with a hundred men-at-arms.  I think my mind had forsaken me altogether, and I spoke like a drunken man with a tongue not my own.  I had only the one idea in my foolish head—­to be true to Ringan, and to meet the death of which I was assured with an unflinching face.  Yet perhaps my very madness was the course of discretion.  You cannot move an Indian by pity, and he will show mercy only to one who, like a gamecock, asks nothing less.

The chief heard me gravely, and spoke to the others.  One cried out something in a savage voice, and for a moment a fierce argument was raised, which the chief settled with uplifted hand.

“My brother speaks bold words,” he said.  “The spirits of his fathers cry out for the companionship of such a hero.  When the wrongs of our race have been avenged, I wish him good hunting in the Kingdom of the Sunset.”

They took me and stripped me mother naked.  Has any man who reads this tale ever faced an enemy in his bare feet?  If so, he will know that the heart of man is more in his boots than philosophers wot of.  Without them he feels lost and unprepared, and the edge gone from his spirit.  But without his clothes he is in a far worse case.  The winds of heaven play round his nakedness; every thorn and twig is his assailant, and the whole of him seems a mark for the arrows of his foes.  That stripping was the thing that brought me to my senses.  I recognized that I was to be the subject of those hellish tortures which the Indians use, the tales of which are on every Borderer’s lips.

And yet I did not recognize it fully, or my courage must have left me then and there.  My imagination was still limping, and I foresaw only a death of pain, not the horrid incidents of its preparation.  Death I could face, and I summoned up every shred of my courage.  Ringan’s voice was still in my ear, his airy songs still sang themselves in my brain.  I would not shame him, but oh! how I envied him lying, all troubles past, in his quiet grave!

The night was mild, and the yellow radiance of the moon seemed almost warmth-giving.  I sat on that log in a sort of stupor, watching my enemies preparing my entertainment.  One thing I noted, that there were no women in the camp.  I remembered that I had heard that the most devilish tortures were those which the squaws devised, and that the Indian men were apt to be quicker and more merciful in their murderings.

Then I was lifted up and carried to a flat space beside the stream, where the trunk of a young pine had been set upright in the ground.  A man, waving a knife, and singing a wild song, danced towards me.  He seized me by the hair, and I actually rejoiced, for I knew that the pain of scalping would make me oblivious of all else.  But he only drew the sharp point of the knife in a circle round my head, scarce breaking the skin.