vomited the demons forth.  Naked, breech-clouted, garbed in fragments of white men’s dress, they swarmed into the clearing, into the cabin, about the two prisoners in their midst.  Passively, patiently waiting for hours, of a sudden they seemed possessed of a frenzy of haste, of savage abandon, of drunken exhilaration in the cunning that had won the game without a shot from the white man’s gun, without the injury of a single warrior.  They were in haste, and yet they were not in haste.  They looted the cabin like fire and then fought among themselves for the plunder.  They applied the torch to the shanty’s roof as though pressed by the Great Spirit; then capered fiendishly in its illumination, oblivious of time until, tinder dry, it had burned level with the earth.  Last of all, purposely reserved as a climax, they gave their attention to the pair of half-naked, bound and gagged figures in their midst.  Then it was the scene became an orgy indeed.  The havoc preceding had but whetted their appetite for the finale.  Savagery personified, cruelty unqualified, deadly hate, primitive lust—­every black passion lurking in the recesses of the human mind stalked brazenly into the open, stood forth defiant, sinister, unashamed.  But let it pass.  It was but a repetition of a thousand similar scenes enacted on the swiftly narrowing frontier, a fraction of the price civilisation ever pays to savagery, inevitable as a nation’s expansion, as its progression.

It was eight of the clock when came that final warning whistle of prairie owl.  It was not yet ten when, silent as they had come, unbelievably impassive when but an hour before they had been irresponsible madmen, temporarily cruelty-surfeited, they resumed their journey.  Single file, each footstep of those who followed fair in the print of the leader, a long, long line of ghostly, undulatory shadows, forming the most treacherous deadly serpent that ever inhabited earth, they moved eastward until they reached the bank of the swift little river; then turned north, leaving the abandoned, desolated settlement, the ruined cornfields, as tokens of their handiwork, as a message to other predatory bands who might follow, as a challenge to the white man who they knew would return.  As passed the slow hours toward morning they moved swiftly and more swiftly.  The gliding walk became a dog trot, almost a lope; their arms swung back and forth in unison, the pat, pat of their moccasined feet was like the steady drip of eaves from a summer rain, the rustle of their passing bodies against the dense vegetation a soft accompaniment.  Autochthonous as they had appeared they disappeared.  Night and distance swallowed them up.  But for a trampled, ruined grainfield, the smouldering ruins of what had once been a house, the glaring white of two naked bodies in the starlight against the background of dark earth, it was as though they had not come.  But for this, and one other thing—­a single sound, repeated again and again, dulled, muffled as though coming from the earth itself.