The warriors emerged from the last fringe of the forest, their faces blackened, the hideous chant for their lost rising and falling, but never ceasing.  Forward to meet them poured a mongrel throng—­old men, old squaws, children, mangy curs, and a few warriors.  Paul was with Red Eagle, and when the old squaws saw him, they stopped their plaintive howl and sent up a sudden shrill note of triumph.  In a moment Paul was in a ring of ghastly old faces, in every one of which snapped a pair of cruel black eyes.  Then the old women began to push him about, to pinch him, and to strike him, and they showed incredible activity.

Thoroughly angry and in much pain, Paul struck at the hideous hags; but they leaped away, jabbered and laughed, and returned to the attack.  While he was occupied with those in front of him, others slipped up behind him, jabbed him in the back, or violently twitched the hair on his neck.  Tears of pain and rage stood in Paul’s eyes, and he wheeled about, only to have the jeering throng wheel with him and continue their torture.  At last he caught one of them a half blow, and she reeled and fell.  The others shouted uproariously, and the warriors standing by joined in their mirth.

One of the hags finally struck Paul a resounding smack in the face, and as he turned to pursue her another from behind seized a wisp of hair and tried to tear it out by the roots.  Paul whirled in a frenzy, and so quickly that she could not escape him.  He seized her withered old throat in both his hands, and then and there he would have choked her to death, but the warriors interfered, and pulled his hands loose.  But they also drove the old women away, and Paul was let alone for the time.  As he stood on one side, gasping as much with anger as with pain, Braxton Wyatt, who had not been persecuted at all, came to him again with ironic words and derisive gesture.

“It was just as I told you, Paul,” he said.  “I gave you good advice.  If you had taken it, they would have spared you.  What you have just got is only a taste to what you may suffer.”

Paul felt a dreadful inclination to shudder, but he managed to control himself.

“I’d rather die under the torture than do what you have done, you renegade!” he said.

This was the first time since they crossed the Ohio that he had replied to Braxton, but even now he would say no more, and Wyatt, following his custom, shrugged his shoulders and walked away.  Then all, mingled in one great throng, went forward to the village.  Paul saw an irregular collection of buffalo-skin and deer-skin tepees, and a few pole wigwams, with some rudely cultivated fields of maize about them.  A fine brook flowed through the village, and the site, on the whole, was well chosen, well watered, and sheltered by the little hills from cold winds.  It was too far away from those hills to be reached by a marksman in ambush, and all about hung signs of plenty—­drying venison and buffalo meat, and skins of many kinds.