The fire, by this time blazing brightly, gave us a full view of the entire dismantled interior.  The cabin was a complete wreck, the roof practically all gone and the upper logs of the side walls either fallen within or dangling in threat.  Above clung jagged sections, trembling with their own weight; the lower walls were blackened by powder and stained with blood; the floor was strewn with dead bodies, disfigured and distorted, lying exactly as they fell, while littered all about were weapons, dropped by stricken hands.  Clearly enough it had been the sudden plunge of heavy timbers and the dislodgment of those upper logs, which accounted for this havoc of death.  There were dead there pierced by bullets and brained by rifle stocks, but the many had met their fate under the avalanche of logs, and amid the burning glare of exploding powder.

Only between arched timbers and sections of fallen roof could we move at all, and beneath the network of this entanglement the majority of the bodies lay, crushed and mangled.  I saw Kirby, free from his bonds, but dead beneath a heavy beam.  His face was toward us and the flicker of flame revealed a dark spot on his forehead—­his life had never been crushed out by that plunging timber which pinned him there; it had been ended by a bullet.  My eyes sought hers, in swift memory of my last order, and she must have read my thought.

“No,” she said, “not that, Steven.  It was the boy who shot him.  Oh, please, can we not go?  There is light already in the sky overhead—­see.  Take me away from here—­anywhere, outside.”

“In a moment; all these surely are dead, beyond our aid, and yet we must not depart foodless.  We know not how far it still may be to Ottawa.  Wait, while I search for the things we need.”

“Not alone; I must be where I can touch you.  Try to understand.  Oh, you do not know those hours I have spent in agony—­I have died a thousand deaths since that sun went down.”

“You were conscious—­all night long?”

“Conscious?  Yes, and unhurt, yet prisoned helpless beneath those two logs yonder, saved only by that over-turned bench.  Elsie, poor thing, never knew how death came, it was so swift, but I lay there, within a foot of her body unscratched.  I could think only of you, Steven, but with never a dream that you lived.  There were groans at first and cries.  Some Indians crept in through the door and dragged out a few who lived.  But with the coming of darkness all sounds ceased and such silence was even more dreadful than the calls, for help.  Oh, I cannot tell you,” and she clung to me, her voice breaking.  “I—­I dared not move for hours, and then, when I did try, found I could not; that I was held fast.  Only for a knife in the hand of a dead savage, which I managed to secure, I could never have freed myself.  And oh, the unspeakable horror of creeping in the darkness among those bodies.  I knew where the fireplace must be; that there might be live coals there still.  I had to have light; I had to know if you were dead.”