CHAPTER XXV.AGAIN A PRISONER.
Lena Forest had been recaptured by the handsome young chief, Lightfoot. By hard riding, he and a comrade had circled round the eastern end of the line of fire, only to find their horses exhausted by the terrible run and themselves driven back by the flames.
They abandoned their horses, and when the fire died down along the edge of the rocky hills, they set out across the burned area on foot.
They had become separated from the other Blackfeet, also, in the wild chase. Lightfoot had lost sight of the young Indian girl, Wind Flower.
His present companion was a young brave who stood ready to yield him obedience as a chieftain of the Blackfoot nation. With this young warrior, whose name was Red Antelope, Lightfoot came finally to the gully.
They could not leap it because of its width, and this fact induced the young chief to think that perhaps the horse of the white man had not been able to get across.
To break their trail, Lightfoot descended, with his companion, into the gully; and then they went on down, until they reached the point where Clayton’s horse had fallen.
They saw the girl bending over the prostrate youth, and the horse lying dead. She did not see them, so wrapped was she in her grief and in her frantic effortsto restore life to the seemingly inanimate form of her hero.
Under the conditions, they had no trouble in approaching her and making her again a prisoner.
Lightfoot was on the point of lifting the scalp of the apparently dead white man, when a sound off in the distance made him think that enemies were near and haste was desirable; so he caught up the girl, and, with the aid of Red Antelope, bore her hastily toward the cañon. There they brought to light a sunken canoe, which they emptied of its water, and set out down the cañon stream in it, taking the helpless and almost insane white girl with them.
Of the running of the cañon river, Lena Forest had afterward no very clear recollection. That recollection was like the memory of a hideous nightmare. The flying canoe, the water that boiled round the sharp rocks, the black shadows and the blacker cañon tunnel, together with the painted faces and half-naked bodies of her Blackfeet captors, were things and shapes of terror from which she shrank in fright, cowering, and covering her eyes.
Her strength and the temporary heroism she had shown when with her lover had gone. She felt that death was better than this; and once, in her despair, she would have thrown herself into the river, if Red Antelope had not restrained her. He threw her down in the bottom of the canoe, with a cry of warning and anger, and then swung his hatchet menacingly before her terrified eyes.
Lightfoot, wielding the paddle, grunted assent tothis threat. In his eyes, a squaw should be made obedient, and fear and threats were good weapons for that purpose. If an Indian squaw was disobedient to her lord and master, she was flogged; and he, without compunction, would have applied a whip to this white girl, if he had thought it necessary. Women were wholly inferior creatures, and they might be stolen as a horse is stolen; and if so stolen, they belonged by right to the one who thus carried them away. It was Indian custom, and to the Indian mind that made it right.
So they gave scant attention to the tears and entreaties and the pitiful terror of the white girl thus dragged into a horrible captivity. Tears did not kill women. In their opinion, tears and crying were good for them; they often made the eyes brighter and washed the dust of the prairie from smooth brown cheeks!
After the passage of the underground river, the canoe shot out into comparatively placid water, with green banks on each side, between which it floated, until soon Blackfeet horsemen were seen, off on the right bank. These horsemen brandished lances and yelled as they came riding wildly toward the canoe.
Lightfoot stood up, waving his paddle, and then his hand.
He was immediately recognized. With a thunder of hoofs, and more yelling, the wild horsemen drew up on the bank as the canoe was shot to land.
Lena Forest, white-faced and fearful, regarded this array of naked warriors with dismay. But her heart was already broken, because of her belief that herlover was dead. If these Indians would only kill her, she would not object, she thought. She feared captivity and Indian cruelty more than she feared death.
The horsemen were a part of Crazy Snake’s band. As for that chief, he was absent, and was said to be gone to get more warriors, with whom to resist the white men in the fight that all believed would now surely come.
Lightfoot, standing up in the canoe, with paddle raised, pointed to the prisoner.
“She is to be the squaw of Crazy Snake!” he said, in order to settle that matter once for all, as he saw a number of the younger warriors regarding her with admiring looks. “Crazy Snake placed her in my charge, to take to the village; and with Red Antelope I have got her thus far.”
In imperfect English he now ordered her to get out of the canoe.
When she did not move quick enough to please him, he caught her by the hair and half dragged her out.
Some of the warriors laughed, as if pleased, when this brutal treatment brought from her a cry of pain.
“We wait here for Crazy Snake,” one of the braves informed Lightfoot. “He was to meet us here with more warriors. What word comes from the white men?”
Lightfoot told them as much as he knew, or as much as he cared to tell them.
There were no lodges here, and but a temporary camping place had been made. The girl prisoner saton the ground, in the blazing heat of the sun, without shelter.
The warriors gathered around her, some with blankets drawn about their shoulders, but most of them only in war paint and feathers. They were merely disgusting brutes to her. Whatever others might see in them that was picturesque and attractive, she saw none of it. They were of the men who had murdered her father, and had taken her captive, and now held her here in their midst.
But most she thought of the fate of her lover, whose body, as she believed, had been left in that gully in the midst of the burned grasslands.
What the future held for her she shuddered to think, but she knew that death would be preferable to continued captivity with these savages.
The Blackfeet watched the shores of the stream and the cañon a while, and also stationed warriors on the tops of the hills to report the approach of any one. They were waiting the arrival of Crazy Snake.
When he did not come as soon as anticipated, they made hasty preparations for departure, intending to ride farther down the stream to the Indian village. The white prisoner was to be placed there, and there were other reasons which now induced them to make this retreat. So far, no white men had been sighted by them.
Lena Forest had been anxiously hoping to learn that white men were coming, but her hope of that died away when she was placed on the back of a pony and was again borne away.