Squaws, dirty of person and foul of mouth, often more ferocious in appearance and cruel in action than their masters, were everywhere, dodging amid the writhing bodies, screaming shrilly from excitement, their long coarse hair whipping in the wind.  Nor were they all Pottawattomies:  others had flocked into this carnival of blood,—–­Wyandots and Sacs, even Miamis, until now it had become a contest for supremacy in savagery.  ’T was as if hell itself had opened, to vomit forth upon the prairie that blood-stained crew of dancing demons and shock the night with crime.

A dead white man,—­the poor lad whose early torture we had witnessed,—­his half-burnt body still hanging suspended at the stake, was in the midst of them, a red glare of embers beneath him, the curling smoke creeping upward into the black sky from about his head like devil’s incense.  In front of this hideous spectacle, regardless of the mutilated body, sat the ferocious old demon I had seen the evening previous, his head crowned with a bison’s horns, his naked breast daubed with red and yellow figures to resemble crawling snakes, his face the hideous representation of a grinning skull.  Above all other sounds rang out his yells, inciting his fellows to further atrocities, and accompanied by the dull booming of his wooden drum.

It was into this pack of ravening beasts that poor De Croix staggered from the surrounding shadows; and they surged about him, clamoring for place, greeting their new-found victim with jeers and blows and hoots of bitter hatred, viciously slashing at him with their knives, so that the very sight of it turned me sick, and made me sink my head upon my arms in helplessness and horror.  A sudden cessation in the infernal uproar led me to peer forth once more.  They had dragged the charred and blackened trunk of the dead soldier down from the post where it had hung suspended, and were fastening De Croix in its place, binding his hands behind the support, and kicking aside the still glowing embers of the former fire to give him space to stand.  It was brutally, fiendishly done, with thongs wound about his body so tightly as to lift the flesh in great welts, and those who labored at it striking cruel blows at his naked, quivering form, spitting viciously into his face, with taunting words, seeking through every form of ferocious ingenuity to wring from their helpless victim some sign of suffering, some shrieking plea for mercy.  Once I marked a red devil stick a sharpened sliver of wood into the Frenchman’s bare shoulder, touched it with fire, and then stand back laughing as the bound victim sought vainly to dislodge the torturing brand.