I crawled through the slight opening into that black interior, turning to hold open the flap sufficiently to peer forth once more.  I knew not where she vanished, as she faded away like a shadow; but I had hardly secured refuge, when a dozen painted warriors trooped by, shouting their fierce greeting.  In the midst of them, half-stripped, and bleeding as if from freshly inflicted wounds, staggered a white man; and as the firelight fell full upon his haggard face, I recognized De Croix.

CHAPTER XXIX

A SOLDIER OF FRANCE

What followed was so extraordinary and incredible that I hesitate to record it, lest there be those who, judging in their own conceit, and knowing little of savage Indian nature, may question the truth of my narration, Yet I am now too old a man to permit unjust criticism to swerve me from the task I have assumed.

The extreme of misery that overwhelmed me at the moment when I beheld my comrade driven forward like a trapped beast to a death by torture, found expression in a sudden moan, which, fortunately for me, was unnoted amid the shouts of greeting that arose around the fire when those gathered there caught sight of the new-comers.  Instantly all was confusion and uproar; a scene of savage debauchery, unrelieved by a redeeming feature or a sign of mercy.  It was as if poor De Croix had been hurled, bound and gagged, into a den of infuriated wolves, whose jaws already dripped with the blood of slaughter.  Gleaming weapons, glaring and lustful eyes, writhing naked bodies, pressed upon him on every side, hurling him back and forth in brute play, every tongue mocking him, in every up-lifted hand a weapon for a blow.

The fierce animal nature within these red fiends was now uppermost, fanned into hot flame by hours of diabolical torture of previous victims, in which they had exhausted every expedient of cruelty to add to the dying agony of their prey.  To this, fiery liquor had yielded its portion; while the weird incantations of their priests had transformed the most sober among them into demons of malignity.  If ever, earlier in the night, their chiefs had exercised any control over them, that time was long since past; and now the inflamed warriors, bursting all restraint, answered only to the war-drum or made murderous response to the superstition of their medicine-men.

The entire centre of the encampment was a scene of drunken orgy, a phantasmagoria of savage figures, satanic in their relentless cruelty and black barbarity.  Painted hundreds, bedecked with tinkling beads and waving feathers, howled and leaped in paroxysms of fury about the central fire, hacking at the helpless bodies of the dead victims of earlier atrocities, tearing their own flesh, beating each other with whips like wire, their madly brandished weapons flashing angrily in the flame-lit air.