“Aye, Jack; they have us hard and fast this time.  I have been praying you’d never come alive enough to feel the fire.”

“We were taken together?” So much I dared ask.

“In the same onset.  ’Twas but a question of clock ticks in that back-to-back business.  But they paid scot and lot,” this with an inching nod toward a row of naked bodies propped sitting against a fallen tree; nine of them in all, one with its severed head between its knees, and three others showing the gaping hacks and hewings of the great broadsword.

“They’ve fetched them here to see us burn,” he went on.  “But by the gods, we have the warrant of two good blades and Ephraim Yeates’s hunting-knife that the only fires they’ll ever see are those of hell.”

“Yeates?” I queried.  “Then they have taken him and the Catawba, as well?”

“Not alive, you may be sure, else we should have them for company.  But it has a black look for our friends that the flying column we met in the stream-cave came back so soon.  Moreover, the bodies of the three peace-pipe smokers were found and brought in; that will be the Great Bear holding his head in his hands at the end of yonder bloody masquerade.”

“I guessed as much.  God rest our poor comrades!”

“Aye; and God help Madge!  ’Tis no time for reproaches, but amongst us we have signed her death warrant with our bunglings.”

“If it were only death!” I groaned.

“’Tis just that, Jack,” said he; “no better, mayhap, but no worse.  When we were downed by that screeching mob, she was out and on her knees to Falconnet, beseeching him to spare us.  He put her off smoothly at first, saying ‘twas the Indians’ affair—­that they would not be balked of their vengeance by any interference of his.  But when she only begged the more piteously, he showed his true colors, rapping out that we should have as swift a quittance as we had meant to give him, and that within the hour she should be the mistress of Appleby and free to marry an English gentleman.”

“Well?” said I, making sure that now at last he must know all.

“At that she stood before him bravely, and I saw that all the time she had had the Catawba’s knife hidden in the folds of her gown.  ’You have spoken truth for once, Captain Falconnet; I shall be free,’ she said.  ‘Come and tell me when you have added these to your other murders.’”

“And then?”

“Then she went back to her prison wigwam, walking through the rabble of redcoats and redskins as proudly as the Scottish Mary went to the block.”

“She will do it, think you?” I queried, fearful lest she would, but more fearful lest her courage should fail at the pinch.

“Never doubt it.  Good Catholic as she is, there is martyr blood in her on the mother’s side, and that will help her to die unsullied.  And God nerve her to it, say I.”

I said “Amen” to that; and thereupon we both fell silent, watching as condemned men on the gallows the busy preparations for our taking off.