“Run to Captain Bowman and tell him to send ten men to this door.  But they must come man by man, to escape detection.  Do you understand?” I nodded and was starting, but he still held me.  “God bless you, Davy, you are a brave boy.”

He closed the door softly and I sped away, my moccasins making no sound on the soft dirt.  I reached the garrison, was challenged by Jack Terrill, the guard, and brought by him to Bowman’s room.  The Captain sat, undressed, at the edge of his bed.  But he was a man of action, and strode into the long room where his company was sleeping and gave his orders without delay.

Half an hour later there was no light in the village.  The Colonel’s headquarters were dark, but in the kitchen a dozen tall men were waiting.

CHAPTER XVII

THE SACRIFICE

So far as the world knew, the Chief of the Long Knives slept peacefully in his house.  And such was his sense of power that not even a sentry paced the street without.  For by these things is the Indian mind impressed.  In the tiny kitchen a dozen men and a boy tried to hush their breathing, and sweltered.  For it was very hot, and the pent-up odor of past cookings was stifling to men used to the open.  In a corner, hooded under a box, was a lighted lantern, and Tom McChesney stood ready to seize it at the first alarm.  On such occasions the current of time runs sluggish.  Thrice our muscles were startled into tenseness by the baying of a hound, and once a cock crew out of all season.  For the night was cloudy and pitchy black, and the dawn as far away as eternity.

Suddenly I knew that every man in the room was on the alert, for the skilled frontiersman, when watchful, has a sixth sense.  None of them might have told you what he had heard.  The next sound was the faint creaking of Colonel Clark’s door as it opened.  Wrapping a blanket around the lantern, Tom led the way, and we massed ourselves behind the front door.  Another breathing space, and then the war-cry of the Puans broke hideously on the night, and children woke, crying, from their sleep.  In two bounds our little detachment was in the street, the fire spouting red from the Deckards, faint, shadowy forms fading along the line of trees.  After that an uproar of awakening, cries here and there, a drum beating madly for the militia.  The dozen flung themselves across the stream, I hot in their wake, through Mr. Brady’s gate, which was open; and there was a scene of sweet tranquillity under the lantern’s rays,—­the North Wind and his friends wrapped in their blankets and sleeping the sleep of the just.

“Damn the sly varmints,” cried Tom, and he turned over the North Wind with his foot, as a log.

With a grunt of fury the Indian shed his blanket and scrambled to his feet, and stood glaring at us through his paint.  But suddenly he met the fixed sternness of Clark’s gaze, and his own shifted.  By this time his followers were up.  The North Wind raised his hands to heaven in token of his innocence, and then spread his palms outward.  Where was the proof?