CHAPTER XXI.THE PRISONER.
Lena Forest had hardly entered the cabin and stepped toward the bed, where, in obedience to the words of Buffalo Bill, she expected to lie down a while, when a footstep sounded softly behind her, and a blanket fell over her head.
Startled and alarmed beyond measure, she yet would have cried out, but that the blanket was drawn tightly about her mouth, and on top of the blanket a heavy hand pressed back the words she would have uttered. She struggled frantically, but uselessly; for she was caught up in arms too strong for her to resist, and was carried quietly out of the room.
Lena soon knew she was out of the cabin, for the feet of her captor no longer thudded dully on the wooden floor, but descended, as if down steps, and sank in soft grass now without a sound.
Then she began to struggle again, trying desperately to throw off the enveloping and smothering blanket, and making so gallant a fight for her liberty that she tore a feather from the redskin’s head. That feather told her that he was an Indian, which was a thing she had already guessed and feared.
She tried in vain to scream for help when this awful fear that she was held by an Indian became certain knowledge; but again that heavy hand kept her from making more than a few inarticulate sounds; and she was being borne on, she knew not where.
She became unconscious soon, a result largely of the choking and smothering blanket, and for a time thereafter she had no knowledge of anything.
When she was put down at last, arousing at the same time, she succeeded in whisking aside the blanket. Then she saw before her a large Indian, almost naked, smeared with paint, who was drawing a canoe from beneath the bank, and getting it ready, apparently, for a journey on the river that flowed before her.
She recognized the river as the cañon stream that rolled by her home, and she recognized this spot as one she had seen many a time, a mile below the cabin, at a point where the walls of the cañon began to contract on the grassy valley, in readiness for further narrowing farther down.
The Indian saw that she had recovered consciousness, and he swung around, lifting his hatchet menacingly.
“White girl no make noise!” he warned, speaking fair English.
The desire to cry out was frozen in her heart, which was filled with a strange terror of this painted redskin. She stared at him, as the bird is said to stare at the snake in whose power it has fallen.
The savage adjusted the light canoe in the water, stopping in his work now and then to listen, as if he anticipated pursuit.
“White girl go with Crazy Snake!” he commanded, again producing the fear-impelling hatchet, whose bright blade glanced the sunlight like burnished silver.To her imagination that hatchet edge was red with the blood of her murdered father.
She tried now to spring up, and to run; and she tried to cry out. But Crazy Snake, with a single bound, caught her by the hair, and threw her to the ground. He flashed forth a knife, now, and thrust it before her terrified eyes.
“Injun kill!” he gurgled, in a way to make her blood run cold. “White girl want Blackfoot kill?”
“Yes, kill me!” she said, in sudden desperation. “Nothing better could happen to me now.”
However, he did not put his threat into execution, for he had simply been trying to frighten her. He lifted her in his bare, painted arms, and deposited her in the canoe, she being too helpless from fear and weakness to do anything to prevent this. Then he stepped into the canoe himself, pushed it off from shore, and, seating himself deliberately, he took up the paddle and sent the light boat skimming downstream.
The current began to race faster here, and this, with the strokes of the paddle, hurled the canoe on at dizzying speed. Yet this speed was as nothing compared with that which the canoe made later on, when it was caught in the torrent that rushed in wild cataracts through the pinched-in space of the narrowed cañon, where the black walls came close together, and towered to a great height overhead.
Crazy Snake was skillful with the paddle. The girl’s eyes were fixed on the water ahead, and though more than once it seemed to her that the frail craft mustsurely be split on some rock, with a deft turn he guided it past the danger point, and on down the wild and tumbling stream.
Lena Forest tried to think with something of sanity of her condition, and failed utterly. Horror still held her, and she came from under its spell but slowly.
When the rapids had been passed safely, Crazy Snake began to talk.
“Brown Eyes know why the great Blackfoot chief, Crazy Snake, do this?” he said, naming her thus from the color of her eyes.
She stared at him, as if she did not comprehend his meaning, but really because she was still too terrified to answer him.
“Blackfeet kill man that dig for the yellow earth,” he explained. “The yellow earth makes the white man crazy, and he steals the land of the Indians that he may dig it. So we kill him.”
She knew that he meant her father.
“White men hunting for the yellow earth threw a bad spell on the Blackfeet. The evil spirits were made mad, and killed the Blackfeet. They died. The son of Crazy Snake died. For that we kill the white men.”
She was sitting in the bow of the canoe, facing him, and he stared at her with his shining black eyes, that looked so like the eyes of a snake. She did not wonder that he was called, or called himself, Crazy Snake; for those snaky eyes, to her heated imagination, seemed like the eyes of some deadly serpent. They almost fascinated her.
“But—but why do you—take me?” she gasped at last.
Crazy Snake gave utterance to what seemed almost a chuckle.
“Brown Eyes purty squaw!” he said. “Wide Foot, the squaw of Crazy Snake, is old; he take a young squaw, who is white. The white men will be killed. But the Brown Eyes she will live.”
The statement roused her as nothing had done since the death of her father.
“I would rather die!” she said. “I will kill myself rather than become your—your wife!”
She half rose, and in another second would have leaped into the stream; but he stretched out his long right arm with a quick motion, catching her by her hair, which had come unbound in her struggles with him, and jerked her flat in the bottom of the canoe.
“Ugh!” he grunted. “Brown Eyes fool! Brown Eyes drown herself? No, no! Brown Eyes be the squaw of Crazy Snake.”
She lay there, in the bottom of the canoe, cowering.
He put the paddle into the canoe, and then lifted her to a seat, where she sat weakly, regarding him with looks of terror and loathing.
Then he tried to make her see that he was doing her a great favor; for he declared again that while all the white men were to be killed, she was to be permitted to live, and would become the squaw of a great chief.
She failed to see the beauty of the picture he tried to draw. She preferred death to that.
A little farther down the stream Crazy Snake ran the canoe ashore, where he tied it, after sinking it.
She had been compelled to get out, and sat on the bank watching him sink and conceal the boat.
“Brown Eyes go on!” he said, coming up to her.
It seemed that her terror could go no further; but apparently it did, when from the bushes just ahead there appeared now another Indian.
Crazy Snake showed surprise, thus evidencing that the appearance of this Indian was unexpected even by him.
The Indian was a Blackfoot, and was a young man, whose head displayed the feathers of a chief. For an Indian, he was decidedly handsome; yet the liberal application of paint and grease to his body made him a disgusting sight to the girl prisoner.
His black eyes opened in wide admiration, as he looked upon her.
“Lightfoot is a long way from the village?” said the chief, speaking to the younger Indian, who was none other than the warrior whom the two scouts had observed.
“He was with the party that followed the old trapper,” said Lightfoot. “We lost his trail and could not find it again.”
“If the young men wish to find the old whitehead, they can do it by going up the river.”
Crazy Snake waved his hand in the direction whence he had come. He led the way under the cover of the trees, and then turned to the young Indian, who had followed silently behind the prisoner.
At the first word it was plain that Crazy Snake had taken a new line of thought.
“Can the great chief trust his son?” he said, speaking in the hyperbole characteristic of the red men, for Lightfoot was not related to him.
Lightfoot folded his arms upon his paint-smeared bosom and looked Crazy Snake full in the eye.
“The son of the great chief, Crazy Snake, has but to hear and obey,” he said. “Let the chief speak. Lightfoot is but a child, and will learn wisdom of the great chief.”
They spoke in Blackfoot, of which the prisoner did not understand a word.
She felt so weak and trembling that she was almost on the point of sinking to the ground. She lifted her eyes to heaven, as if praying, and uttered a name, the name of one who, she was sure, would follow to the ends of the earth, to rescue or avenge her, if he but knew. And she uttered, also, the name of Buffalo Bill.
Crazy Snake stopped the words that were on his tongue and gazed at her in a questioning way.
“What does the Brown Eyes say?” he asked.
“Nothing!” she gasped. “Nothing!”
She shook with terror.
Crazy Snake turned again to Lightfoot.
“The young chief is wise,” he said. “Crazy Snake is the great war chief of the Blackfeet. His red arrow burns on the breasts of many white men already, and its bloody fire shall strike fear everywhere. The father of Brown Eyes wears it, and his scalp is nowin the belt of Running Deer. But the girl is to be kept in the Blackfoot village. Crazy Snake has work to do, for the white men will gather to avenge the death of the men who wear the crimson arrow.”
Lightfoot stood with folded arms, listening.
“White men, one of them Long Hair, are now pursuing Crazy Snake. So Crazy Snake wishes to turn back; and he wishes to gather warriors, many warriors, to oppose the white men. He would strike the cunning white men down when they follow—strike down the thieves that steal the lands of the Blackfeet that they may dig in it for the yellow earth.”
“The son of the great chief hears,” said Lightfoot, when the older chief paused.
“The great chief will trust Lightfoot to take the white prisoner, Brown Eyes, on to the Blackfoot village, where she is to be held until the coming of Crazy Snake. Does my son hear with open ears?”
“Lightfoot hears what the great chief says.”
The young Indian looked at the girl, who still stood trembling before them. A sudden admiration of her beauty shone in his black eyes, but it was not observed either by the chief or the girl.
“Lightfoot hears, and will obey,” he repeated.
Crazy Snake returned to the canoe, and seemed to consider raising it and resuming the voyage down the river. But he changed his mind, apparently, and, turning from the river, he hastened away, and was soon lost to view.
Lightfoot stood looking at the girl who had been placed in his charge.
“Come!” he said finally. “We go to the village.”
She was listening to the retreating footsteps of the older chief.
“No, I will not go with you!” she declared.
Admiration showed in his eyes. But he was an Indian, and accustomed to having women obey. He caught her by the wrist and jerked her along.
“Come!” he said. “Brown Eyes is very beautiful. It is too bad that she is to enter the lodge of Crazy Snake, who has a wife already.” He was speaking to himself, for his words were Blackfoot, and she did not understand them. “Brown Eyes is too beautiful to be the squaw of Crazy Snake. She should mate with a younger warrior. Is it meet that winter should marry summer? Brown Eyes is young, and she is beautiful.”
He stopped and stood facing her, feasting his eyes on her beauty. There was something in his look that terrified her. She tried to break away from him, but again he caught her by the wrist and pulled her along when she resisted.
“Come!” he said, and this time he spoke in English. “We go fast. Blackfoot town long, long way. Crazy Snake say we go fast.”