He bore the torture patiently, as some poor dumb beast suffering at the hand of man, and would not part his lips for all the captain’s curses.  But this was only the merciful beginning.  With yells of savage fury the Indians carried brands to make a slow fire at his feet; and, lest that should not be enough, a brace of them climbed to the roof, tore off the splits for kindling, and set the cabin wall alight behind him.

You may thank God, my dears, that you are living in a kindlier age.  Mayhap the savage, now a-march toward the setting sun, is still as pitiless as he was; but not in any corner of the world, I think, would Anglo-Saxon men, wearing the king’s or any other uniform, be witnesses unmoved of such a devil’s carnival of torment as this that made me nauseate with horror.

As with the stretching of the cord the wretched black spun slowly round and round before the growing blaze, his cries were something terrible to hear.  And when the fire light played upon his face it was a sight to freeze the blood:  the eyes shut tight against the shriveling heat, the cracking lips drawn back, the black skin changing to a dry and sickly brown.  And ever and anon between the shrieks the parched lips shaped a plea:  “O Massa!  Massa Cap’m! shoot po’ nigga and let um die!”

This plea for cruel kindness cut me to the marrow of my bones; and lacking means to save his life, I thought I might at least make shift to try to put him out of misery.

The enemy’s dispositions favored me.  The savages, drunk with lust of blood, leaped and danced around their victim.  Falconnet sat his horse apart beneath the maples, and with his bodyguard of troopers, was well within the borderland of lurid shadow where the fire light mingled with the night.

I crept away and made a swift detour to the right to come behind the rearmost horseman of the troop.  As his ill luck would have it, his horse, affrighted at the firelit pandemonium, was in the act of wheeling to run away.  Being cumbered with a musket, the man made clumsy work of handling his mount, and when the beast came down in a snorting tremble to rear afresh at sight of me, the man flung away the musket and drew his sword.

In cooler blood I might have given him his soldier’s chance, but here again it was another’s life or mine.  Even so, I might have fought him fair, had he but held his tongue and fought in silence.  But this he would not, so I had to quiet him or have the others about my ears upon his shoutings.

That done, I snatched the musket that had cost the man his life, and, staying not to see what should befall, ran back to cover.  In the interval of weapon-getting the fire against the cabin wall had gnawed its way from log to log and now was lapping with its yellow tongues beneath the eaves.  But lest the victim should not suffer long enough, the Indians were at work in yelling frenzy, flogging the blaze with green branches broken from the trees so that the fire itself should not be merciful.