I had grace given me to keep a stout face, mainly because I was relieved that this was to be my fate.  He put the knife back in his girdle, and others laid hold on me.

They smeared my lower limbs with some kind of grease which smelt of resin.  One savage who had picked up a brand from one of the little fires dropped some of the stuff on it, and it crackled merrily.  He grinned at me—­a slow, diabolical grin.

They lashed me to the stake with ropes of green vine.  Then they piled dry hay a foot deep around me, and laid above it wood and green branches.  To make the fuel still greener, they poured water on it.  At the moment I did not see the object of these preparations, but now I can understand it.  The dry hay would serve to burn my legs, which had already been anointed with the inflammable grease.  So I should suffer a gradual torture, for it would be long ere the flames reached a vital part.  I think they erred, for they assumed that I had the body of an Indian, which does not perish till a blow is struck at its heart; whereas I am confident that any white man would be dead of the anguish long ere the fire had passed beyond his knees.

I think that was the most awful moment of my life.  Indeed I could not have endured it had not my mind been drugged and my body stupid with fatigue.  Men have often asked me what were my thoughts in that hour, while the faggots were laid about my feet.  I cannot tell, for I have no very clear memory.  The Power which does not break the bruised reed tempered the storm to my frailty.  I could not envisage the future, and so was mercifully enabled to look only to the moment.  I knew that pain was coming; but I was already in pain, and the sick man does not trouble himself about degrees of suffering.  Death, too, was coming; but for that I had been long ready.  The hardest thing that man can do is to endure, but this was to me no passive endurance; it was an active struggle to show a fortitude worthy of the gallant dead.

So I must suppose that I hung there in my bonds with a motionless face and a mouth which gave out no cry.  They brought the faggots, and poured on water, and I did not look their way.  Some score of braves began a war dance, circling round me, waving their tomahawks, and singing their wild chants.  For me they did not break the moonlit silence, I was hearing other sounds and seeing far other sights.  An old sad song of Ringan’s was in my ears, something about an exile who cried out in France for the red heather and the salt winds of the Isles.

“Nevermore the deep fern,” it ran, “or the bell of the dun deer, far my castle is wind-blown sands, and my homelands are a stranger’s."

And the air brought back in a flash my own little house on the grey hill-sides of Douglasdale, the cluck of hens about the doors on a hot summer morn, the crying of plovers in the windy Aprils, the smell of peatsmoke when the snow drifted over Cairntable.  Home-sickness has never been my failing, but all at once I had a vision of my own land, the cradle of my race, well-beloved and unforgotten over the leagues of sea.  Somehow the thought strengthened me.  I had now something besides the thought of Ringan to keep my heart firm.  If all hell laid hold on me, I must stand fast for the honour of my own folk.