slipped away if we could; but the fate of an old man was warning enough.  Muttering against the braves for embroiling themselves in war without cause, he fell away from the marauders as if to leave.  Le Borgne’s foxy eye saw the move.  Turning, he rushed at the old man with a hiss of air through his teeth like a whistling arrow.  His musket swung up.  It clubbed down.  There was a groan; and as we rounded a bluff at a pace that brought the air cutting in our faces, I saw the old man’s body lying motionless on the snow.

If this was the beginning, what was the end?

Godefroy vowed that the man was only an Indian, and his death was no sin.

“The wolves would ‘a’ picked his bones soon anyway.  He wore a score o’ scalps at his belt.  Pah, an we could get furs without any Indians, I’d see all their skulls go!” snapped the trader.

“If killing’s no murder, whose turn comes next?” asked Jack.

And that gave Godefroy pause.

CHAPTER XVII

A BOOTLESS SACRIFICE

For what I now tell I offer no excuse.  I would but record what savagery meant.  Then may you who are descended from the New World pioneers know that your lineage is from men as heroic as those crusaders who rescued our Saviour’s grave from the pagans; for crusaders of Old World and New carried the sword of destruction in one hand, but in the other, a cross that was light in darkness.  Then may you, my lady-fingered sentimentalist, who go to bed of a winter night with a warming-pan and champion the rights of the savage from your soft place among cushions, realize what a fine hero your redman was, and realize, too, what were the powers that the white-man crushed!

For what I do not tell I offer no excuse.  It is not permitted to relate all that savage warfare meant.  Once I marvelled that a just God could order his chosen people to exterminate any race.  Now I marvel that a just God hath not exterminated many races long ago.

We reached the crest of a swelling upland as the first sun-rays came through the frost mist in shafts of fire.  A quick halt was called.  One white-garbed scout went crawling stealthily down the snow-slope like a mountain-cat.  Then the frost thinned to the rising sun and vague outlines of tepee lodges could be descried in the clouded valley.

An arrow whistled through the air glancing into snow with a soft whirr at our feet.  It was the signal.  As with one thought, the warriors charged down the hill, leaping from side to side in a frenzy, dancing in a madness of slaughter, shrieking their long, shrill—­“Ah—­oh!—­Ah—­oh!”—­yelping, howling, screaming their war-cry—­“Ah—­oh!—­Ah—­oh!—­Ah—­oh!”—­like demons incarnate.  The medicine-man had stripped himself naked and was tossing his arms with maniacal fury, leaping up and down, yelling the war-cry, beating the tom-tom, rattling the death-gourd.  Some of the warriors went down on hands and feet, sidling forward through the mist like the stealthy beasts of prey that they were.