As the warrior gained the little thicket, he saw nothing save some ripples on the surface of the water, and some bubbles rising from its unknown depths.  He was joined by others from the village, and all searched the thicket for some trace of him who had uttered the remarkable cry.  Finally they discovered in it the head-dress of feathers that the young Indian of Seloy had worn as a Seminole warrior, and were forced to conclude that he had drowned himself rather than to live as one of them.  Sneering at the want of taste he had thus displayed, and regretting that he had not been kept a prisoner, and as such been tortured for their amusement, instead of being allowed to become a Seminole, they returned to the village.  The sentinel resumed his watch on the trail, and the incident of E-chee’s disappearance was thought of no more.

When Rene overheard some Indians talking outside the hut in which he lay, and laughingly telling each other of the method E-chee had taken to rejoin his own people, his heart sank within him, and he felt that he no longer had aught to hope for, now that his only friend amid all these enemies was dead.

On the following day preparations for the great feast of rejoicing were actively begun.  In the middle of a small mound just outside the village a stout post of green wood was set deep into the ground, and near it was gathered a great pile of dry wood and fat pine splinters.  This was the stake at which the prisoners were to suffer torture, and around which the chief interest of the festivities was to centre.  The feast was to continue for three days, according to the number of prisoners on hand.  One of them was, by his behavior under the ingenious tortures devised especially for the occasion, to furnish the principal amusement for each day.  At its close, if he were not already dead, he was to be sacrificed.

It was generally understood that the most important of the prisoners, the young white chief, was to be reserved for the last and crowning day of the feast, and for him an especial committee were inventing a series of new and peculiarly painful tortures.

At all hours of the day crowds of women and children gathered about the hut in which Rene was confined, in the hope of catching a glimpse of him.  Their delight knew no bounds when, occasionally, one of the more good-natured of his guards would lift the mat of braided palmetto fibre that hung before the entrance, and allow them to peep in at him, and taunt him with hints of what he was to undergo.

Wearily did the long hours pass with the unhappy boy as he lay thus friendless among cruel enemies, helplessly awaiting the fate from which he shrank so fearfully, and yet from which he could conceive no manner of escape.

CHAPTER XVI

HAS-SE RECEIVES THE TOKEN