Redstock!  I had seen him at Broadalbin that evening in May, threatening the angry settlers with his rifle, when Dorothy and the Brandt-Meester and I had ridden over with news of smoke in the hills.

Murphy tied the prostrate man’s legs, pulled him across the dusty road to the bushes, and laid him on his back under a great maple-tree.

Mount, knife in hand, ripped up the bales of crackling peltry, and Elerson delved in among the skins, flinging them right and left in his impatient search.

“There’s no powder here,” he exclaimed, rising to his knees on the road and staring at Mount; “nothing but badly cured beaver and mangy musk-rat.”

“Well, he baled ’em to conceal something!” insisted Mount.  “No man packs in this moth-eaten stuff for love of labor.  What’s that parcel in the bottom?”

“Not powder,” replied Elerson, tossing it out, where it rebounded, crackling.

“Squirrel pelts,” nodded Mount, as I picked up the packet and looked at the sealed cords.  The parcel was addressed:  “General Barry St. Leger, in camp before Stanwix.”  I sat down on the grass and began to open it, when a groan from the prostrate prisoner startled me.  He had struggled to a sitting posture, and was facing me, eyes bulging from their sockets.  Every vestige of color had left his visage.

“For God’s sake don’t open that!” he gasped—­“there is naught there, sir—­”

“Silence!” roared Mount, glaring at him, while Murphy and Elerson, dropping their armfuls of pelts, came across the road to the bank where I sat.

“I will not be silent!” screamed the man, rocking to and fro on the ground.  “I did not do that!—­I know nothing of what that packet holds!  A Mohawk runner gave it to me—­I mean that I found it on the trail—­”

The riflemen stared at him in contempt while I cut the strings of the parcel and unrolled the bolt of heavy miller’s cloth.

At first I did not comprehend what all that mass of fluffy hair could be.  A deep gasp from Mount enlightened me, and I dropped the packet in a revulsion of horror indescribable.  For the parcel was fairly bursting with tightly packed scalps.

In the deathly silence I heard Redstock’s hoarse breathing.  Mount knelt down and gently lifted a heavy mass of dark, silky hair.

At last Elerson broke the silence, speaking in a strangely gentle and monotonous voice.

“I think this hair was Janet McCrea’s.  I saw her many times at Half-moon.  No maid in Tryon County had hair like hers.”

Shuddering, Mount lifted a long braid of dark-brown hair fastened to a hoop painted blue.  And Elerson, in that strange monotone, continued speaking: 

“The hair on this scalp is braided to show that the woman was a mother; the skin stretched on a blue hoop confirms it.

“The murderer has painted the skin yellow with red dots to represent tears shed for the dead by her family.  There is a death-maul painted below in black; it shows how she was killed.”