A dozen screaming squaws now hustled forward the materials for a fire; I saw branches, roots, and leaves, piled high about his knees, and marked with a shudder the film of blue smoke as it soared upward ere the flame caught the green wood.  Then suddenly some one kicked the pile over, hurling it into the faces of those who stooped beside it; and the fierce clamor ceased as if by magic.

I staggered to my knees, wondering what it could mean,—­this strange silence after all the uproar.  Then I saw.  Out from the shadows, as if she herself were one, the strange girl who had been my companion glided forward into the red radius of the flame, and faced them, her back to De Croix.

Never shall I fail to recall her as she then appeared,—­a veritable goddess of light fronting the fiends of darkness.  With cheeks so white as to seem touched with death, her dark eyes glowed in consciousness of power, while her long, sweeping tresses rippled below her waist, gleaming in a wild red beauty almost supernatural.  How womanly she was, how fair to look upon, and how unconscious of aught save her mission!  One hand she held before her in imperious gesture of command; with the other she uplifted the crucifix, until the silver Christ sparkled in the light.  “Back!” she said clearly.  “Back!  You shall not torture this man!  I know him.  He is a soldier of France!”

CHAPTER XXX

THE RESCUE AT THE STAKE

The word uttered by the strange woman was one to conjure with even then in the Illinois country.  Many a year had passed since the French flag ruled those prairies, yet not a warrior there but knew how the men of that race avenged an injury,—­how swift their stroke, how keen their steel.

I watched the startled throng press closely backward, as if awed by her mysterious presence, influenced insensibly by her terse sentence of command, each dusky face a reflex of its owner’s perplexity.  Drunken as most of them were, crazed with savage blood-lust and hours of remorseless torture of their victims, for the moment that sweet vision of womanly purity held them motionless, as if indeed the figure of the Christ she uplifted before their faces had taught them abhorrence of their crimes.

But it was not for long.  To hundreds of those present she was merely an unknown white woman; while even to those who knew her best, the Pottawattomies, she appeared only as one who came to balk them of their revenge.  They may have held her person inviolate amid their lodges, and even have countenanced her strange teaching; but now she had ventured too far in attempting thus to stand between them and their victim.  They held back a single moment, halted by her fearlessness, rendered cowardly by vague superstitions regarding her religious power; but after the first breathless pause of dumb astonishment and irresolution, voice after voice arose in hoarse cries of rage and