CHAPTER XXVI

THE FIELD OF THE DEAD

The fierce plunging of my horse in his death agony, and his final pitching forward across my prostrate body, were doubtless all that saved my life.  Yielding to their mad desire for plunder, the savages scattered when I fell, and left me lying there for dead.  I do not think I quite lost consciousness in those first moments, although everything became blurred to my sight, and I was imprisoned by the weight above me so that the slightest effort to move proved painful; indeed, I breathed only with the greatest difficulty.

But I both heard and saw, and my mind was intensely occupied with the rush of thought, the horror of all that was going on about me.  How I wish I might blot it out,—­forget forever the hellish deeds of those dancing devils who made mock of human agony and laughed at tears and prayers!  It was plain, as the wild cries of rejoicing rose on every side, that the Indians had swept the field.  The distant sound of firing ceased, and I could hear the pitiful cries of women, the frightened shrieks of children, the shrill note of intense agony wrung from tortured lips.  Close beside me lay a dead warrior, his hideously painted face, with its wide, glaring, dead eyes, so fronting me that I had left only a narrow space through which to peer.  Within that small opening I saw murder done until I closed my eyes in shuddering horror, crazed by my own sense of helplessness, and feeling the awful fate that must already have befallen her I loved.  God knows I had then no faintest wish to live; nor did I dream that I should see the sun go down that day.  Death was upon every side of me, in its most dreadful forms; and every cry that reached my ears, every sight that met my eyes, only added to the frightful reality of my own helplessness.  The inert weight of the horse stifled me so that I drew my short breath almost in sobs; nor did I dare venture upon the slightest attempt at release, hemmed about as I was by merciless fiends now hideously drunk with slaughter.  Once I heard a man plead for mercy, shrieking the words forth as if his intensity of agony had robbed him of all manliness; I saw a young woman fall headlong, the haft of a tomahawk cleaving open her head, as a brawny red arm gripped her by the throat; a child, with long yellow hair, and face distorted by terror, ran past my narrow outlook, a naked savage grasping after her scarcely a foot behind.  I heard her wild scream of despair and his shout of triumph as he struck her down.  Then I lost consciousness, overwhelmed by the multiplying horrors of that field of blood.

It is hard to tell how long I lay there, or by what miracle of God’s great mercy I had escaped death and mutilation.  It was still day, the sun was high in the heaven, and the heat almost intolerable, beating down upon the dry and glittering sand.  I could distinguish no sound near at hand, not even a moan of any kind.  The human forms about me were stiffening in death; nor did any skulking Indian figures appear in sight.