A chattering scream of agony sent shrill and sharp upon the stillness of the night halted me and broke the gibing comment in the midst.  I stood and listened.  The cry rang out again; then I loosed the Andrea in its scabbard and fell a-running, though the half-healed wound scanted me sorely of the breath I wanted.

The cabin clearing, or rather the thinned-out grove which stood in lieu thereof, was but a niggard acre hemmed in on every side, save that toward the river, by the virgin forest.  For cover there were holly thickets here and there, and into one of these I plunged, creeping on hands and knees to gain a hidden view-point.

The scene in the little clearing was one to brand itself in lasting shapes upon the memory.  A brush heap newly kindled gave out a dusky glow flaring in waves of smoky red against the over-arching foliage.  The open space around the cabin was alive with half-naked savages running to and fro; and in the gloom beyond the fire I saw a shadowy horseman backed by others still more phantom-like.

There was no mystery about it.  My enemy had come with sleuth-hound Indians at his back to run me down.  The savages were, no doubt, that band of over-mountain Cherokees pledged by their chief to pilot the powder convoy; and by their help the baronet had tracked me.

This was the first thought, caught at in passing; but when I came to look again I saw what had been done.  Sprawled on the ground before the burning brush pile, his wrinkled face a hideous mask of suffering, with the eyeballs starting from their sockets in the death-wrench, lay my faithful Darius.

By what inhuman tortures they had made him point the way, or how or why they slew him at the last, I know not, but I made sure it was his death-scream that had halted me and set the stillness of the forest alive with ghastly echoes.

At sight of the stiffening body of the faithful slave you may suppose my blood ran cold and hot by turns, and that his blood cried out for vengeance from the sod that soaked it up.  With ten years more of youth and less of age I might have tried to hew my way to Falconnet’s stirrup, and so to square accounts with him.  But had I been a-mind to rush upon the stage without my cue, another climax in the ghastly tragedy forbade it.

This climax turned upon the capture of my horse-boy, Tomas.  The other blacks, it seemed, had made good their escape; but Tomas, lagging behind through fear or foolishness, had given these copper-colored devils leave to run him down and drag him back into the fire light, with yells of savage triumph.

They flung him down upon his knees beside the captain’s horse, and though I caught but here and there a word above the frenzied yipping of the Indians, it was plain the baronet was asking him of me.

I could not hear the black boy’s gibbering answers, but that he would not tell them what they wished to know—­could not, indeed, since I had left no word behind to track me by—­was quickly evident.  A cord was found, and while I crouched behind the holly screen, aghast and helpless as one against two-score or more, they looped him by the thumbs and swung him up to dangle from a maple bough a musket’s length or such a matter before the cabin door.