“By ——! old man,” cried Girty, casting Ella roughly from him, and starting upright, the perfect picture of a fiend in human shape; “another word, and your brains shall be scattered to the four winds of heaven!”

As he spoke, he brandished his tomahawk over the other’s head; while the child, before noticed, uttered a wild scream, and sprung to Mrs. Younker, at whose side she crouched in absolute terror.

“Strike!” answered Younker, mildly, with an unchanged countenance, his eye resting steadily upon the other, who could not meet his gaze in the same manner.  “Strike!  Simon Girty; for I’m a man that’s never feared death, and don’t now; besides, I reiterate all I’ve said, and with my dying breath pray God to curse ye!”

“Not yet!” rejoined Girty, smothering his rage, as he replaced his weapon.  “Not yet, Ben Younker; for you take death too easy; and by ——!  I’ll make it have terrors for you!  But what child is this?” continued he, grasping the little girl fiercely by the arm, causing her to utter a cry of pain and fear.  “By heavens! what do we with squalling children?  Here, Oshasqua, I give her in your charge; and if she yelp again, brain her, by ——!” and he closed with an oath.

The Indian whom we have previously noticed as the sentinel, stepped forward, with a demoniac gleam of satisfaction on his ugly countenance, and taking the child by the hand, led her away some ten paces, where he amused himself by stripping her of such apparel as he fancied might ornament his own person; while she, poor little thing, afraid to cry aloud, could only sob forth the bitterness of her heart.

Meantime Girty turning to Ella, and finding her gradually recovering, assisted her to rise; and then motioning the chief aside, he held a short consultation with him, in the Indian dialect, regarding their next proceedings, and the disposal of the prisoners.

“Were it not, Peshewa, for his own base words,” said the renegade, in reply to some remark of his Indian ally, “I would have spared him; but now,” and his features exhibited a concentrated expression of infernal hate and revenge; “but now, Peshewa, he dies! with all the horrors of the stake, that you, a noble master of the art of torture, can invent and inflict.  The Long Knife[6] must not curse the red man’s friend in his own camp and go unpunished.  I commend him to your mercy, Peshewa—­ha, ha, ha!” and he ended with a hoarse, fiend-like laugh.

“Ugh!” returned Wild-cat, giving a gutteral grunt of satisfaction, although not a muscle of his rigid features moved, and, save a peculiar gleam of his dark eye, nothing to show that he felt uncommon interest in the sentence of Younker:  “Peshewa a chief!  The Great Spirit give him memory—­the Great Spirit give him invention.  He will remember what he has done to prisoners at the stake,—­he can invent new tortures.  But the squaw?”

“Ay, the squaw!” answered the renegade, musingly; “the old man’s wife—­she must be disposed of also.  Ha! a thought strikes me, Peshewa:  You have no wife—­(the savage gave a grunt)—­suppose you take her?”