“Well, well; I see you are Robert and Maud, still”—­dashing streaming tears from his eyes now.  “Yes, I did bring you both into God’s visible church on earth, and you were baptised by one who received his ordination from the Archbishop of Canterbury himself,”—­Maud smiled a little archly—­“and who has never forgotten his ordination vows, as he humbly trusts.  But you are not the only Christians I have made—­I now rank Nicholas among the number”—­

“Nick!” interrupted Sir Robert—­“Wyandotte!” added his wife, with a more delicate tact.

“I call him Nicholas, now, since he was christened by that name—­there is no longer a Wyandotte, or a Saucy Nick.  Major Willoughby, I have a secret to communicate—­I beg pardon, Sir Robert—­but you will excuse old habits—­if you will walk this way.”

Willoughby was apart with the chaplain a full half-hour, during which time Maud wept over the graves, the rest standing by in respectful silence.  As for Nick, a stone could scarcely have been more fixed than his attitude.  Nevertheless, his mien was rebuked, his eye downcast; even his bosom was singularly convulsed.  He knew that the chaplain was communicating to Willoughby the manner in which he had slain his father.  At length, the gentlemen returned slowly towards the graves; the general agitated, frowning, and flushed.  As for Mr. Woods, he was placid and full of hope.  Willoughby had yielded to his expostulations and arguments a forgiveness, which came reluctantly, and perhaps as much for the want of a suitable object for retaliation, as from a sense of Christian duty.

“Nicholas,” said the chaplain, “I have told the general all.”

“He know him!” cried the Indian, with startling energy.

“I do, Wyandotte; and sorry have I been to learn it.  You have made my heart bitter.”

Nick was terribly agitated.  His youthful and former opinions maintained a fearful struggle with those which had come late in life; the result being a wild admixture of his sense of Indian justice, and submission to the tenets of his new, and imperfectly-comprehended faith.  For a moment, the first prevailed.  Advancing, with a firm step, to the general, he put his own bright and keen tomahawk into the other’s hands, folded his arms on his bosom, bowed his head a little, and said, firmly—­

“Strike—­Nick kill cap’in—­Major kill Nick.”

“No, Tuscarora, no,” answered Sir Robert Willoughby, his whole soul yielding before this act of humble submission—­“May God in heaven forgive the deed, as I now forgive you.”

There was a wild smile gleaming on the face of the Indian; he grasped both hands of Willoughby in his own.  He then muttered the words, “God forgive,” his eye rolled upward at the clouds, and he fell dead on the grave of his victim.  It was thought, afterwards, that agitation had accelerated the crisis of an incurable affection of the heart.

A few minutes of confusion followed.  Then Mike, bare-headed, his old face flushed and angry, dragged from his pockets a string of strange-looking, hideous objects, and laid them by the Indian’s side.  They were human scalps, collected by himself, in the course of many campaigns, and brought, as a species of hecatomb, to the graves of the fallen.