Where the Trail Divides | Page 8

Naked, breech-clouted, garbed in fragments of white
men's dress, they swarmed into the clearing, into the cabin, about the
two prisoners in their midst. Passively, patiently waiting for hours, of a
sudden they seemed possessed of a frenzy of haste, of savage abandon,
of drunken exhilaration in the cunning that had won the game without a
shot from the white man's gun, without the injury of a single warrior.
They were in haste, and yet they were not in haste. They looted the
cabin like fire and then fought among themselves for the plunder. They
applied the torch to the shanty's roof as though pressed by the Great
Spirit; then capered fiendishly in its illumination, oblivious of time
until, tinder dry, it had burned level with the earth. Last of all,
purposely reserved as a climax, they gave their attention to the pair of
half-naked, bound and gagged figures in their midst. Then it was the
scene became an orgy indeed. The havoc preceding had but whetted
their appetite for the finale. Savagery personified, cruelty unqualified,
deadly hate, primitive lust--every black passion lurking in the recesses
of the human mind stalked brazenly into the open, stood forth defiant,
sinister, unashamed. But let it pass. It was but a repetition of a thousand
similar scenes enacted on the swiftly narrowing frontier, a fraction of
the price civilisation ever pays to savagery, inevitable as a nation's
expansion, as its progression.
It was eight of the clock when came that final warning whistle of
prairie owl. It was not yet ten when, silent as they had come,
unbelievably impassive when but an hour before they had been
irresponsible madmen, temporarily cruelty-surfeited, they resumed
their journey. Single file, each footstep of those who followed fair in
the print of the leader, a long, long line of ghostly, undulatory shadows,
forming the most treacherous deadly serpent that ever inhabited earth,
they moved eastward until they reached the bank of the swift little river;
then turned north, leaving the abandoned, desolated settlement, the
ruined cornfields, as tokens of their handiwork, as a message to other
predatory bands who might follow, as a challenge to the white man
who they knew would return. As passed the slow hours toward morning
they moved swiftly and more swiftly. The gliding walk became a dog

trot, almost a lope; their arms swung back and forth in unison, the pat,
pat of their moccasined feet was like the steady drip of eaves from a
summer rain, the rustle of their passing bodies against the dense
vegetation a soft accompaniment. Autochthonous as they had appeared
they disappeared. Night and distance swallowed them up. But for a
trampled, ruined grainfield, the smouldering ruins of what had once
been a house, the glaring white of two naked bodies in the starlight
against the background of dark earth, it was as though they had not
come. But for this, and one other thing--a single sound, repeated again
and again, dulled, muffled as though coming from the earth itself.
"Daddy! Daddy! I want you." Then repeated with a throb in its depths
that spoke louder than words. "Daddy, come! I'm afraid!"
CHAPTER III
DISCOVERY
More than a mere name was Fort Yankton. Original in construction, as
necessity ever induces the unusual, it was nevertheless formidable. To
the north was a typical entrenchment with a ditch, and a parapet eight
feet high. To the east was a double board wall with earth tamped
between: a solid curb higher than the head of a tall man. Completing
the square, to the south and west stretched a chain of oak posts set close
together and pierced, as were the other walls of the stockade, by
numerous portholes. Within the enclosure, ark of refuge for settlers
near and afar, was a large blockhouse wherein congregated, mingled
and intermingled, ate, slept, and had their being, as diverse a gathering
of humans as ever graced a single structure even in this land of myriad
types. Virtually the entire population of frontier Yankton was there.
Likewise the settlers from near-by Bon Homme. An adventurer from
the far-away country of the Wahpetons and a trapper from the hunting
ground of the Sissetons drifted in together, together awaited the signal
of the peace pipe ere returning to their own. Likewise from the wild
west of the great river, from the domain of the Uncpapas, the Blackfeet,
the Minneconjous, the Ogallalas, came others; for the alarm of rapine
and of massacre had spread afar. Very late to arrive, doggedly holding

their own until rumour became reality unmistakable, was the colony
from the Jim River valley to the east; but even they had finally
surrendered, the dogging grip of fear, that makes high and low brothers,
at their throats, had fled precipitately before the conquering onslaught
of the Santees.