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Towards bed-time they take out their watch and say they must go home. They start, but cannot stand straight. With a gentleman at each arm, they start up the street. More and more overcome, the man begins to whoop, and shout, and swear, and refuse to go any farther. Hat falls off. Hair gets over his eyes. Door-bell of fine house rings. Wife comes down the stairs. Daughters look over the banisters.
"I'll behave proper, Billie." Five seconds later the beating on the door stopped. The eyes of the big blacksmith with the hammer popped out with a ludicrous terror. Go-Get-'Em Jim was standing in the aisle grinning at him with a six-gun in each hand. With a wild whoop the horseshoer dropped the sledge and turned. He flung himself down the steps carrying with him half a dozen others.
He was gone not more than a minute, and then he came back with a jump and a whoop, holding Jeff's tattered blanket in one hand and a pair of well-worn boots in the other. "Wake snakes!" yelled Nels, striking up a war-dance and frantically flourishing the captured articles over his head. "He's skipped, that hoss-thief has! He's lit out, I tell ye!"
Buck did not like her, but he was feeling too miserable to resist her, taking it as part of the day's miserable work. One of the onlookers, who had been clenching his teeth to suppress hot speech, now spoke up: "It's not that I care a whoop what becomes of you, but for the dogs' sakes I just want to tell you, you can help them a mighty lot by breaking out that sled. The runners are froze fast.
In the frenzied frolic that had seized hold of them they forgot their slain comrades, still unburied. They whoop, shout, and laugh till the cliffs, in wild, unwonted echo, send back the sound of their demoniac mirth. A riot rare as original a true saturnal of savages. Literally buried alive, as Walt Wilder had said, were he and his companion.
Gradually, however, as he saw that the craft remained up in the air, and showed no signs of falling, the fears of the colored man left him. He sat up straighter. "Don't you like it, Rad?" cried Tom. This time the answer came with more decision. "It suah am great, Massa Tom! I'm I'm beginnin' t' like it. Whoop! I guess I do like it! Now if some of dem stuck-up coons could see me "
From his lonely arrogance his spirit flung itself down, grieving, beside her mysterious, incalculable good. He could hear the jolly bang-bang of the drum and the whoop of a trumpet. He could see her catherine-wheeling round the stage, and the man with the bloated face and tragic, intelligent eyes. "Life itself, my dear fellow, life itself." And she was dead.
He heard what appeared to be an echo, and then one of the warriors in the village replied with a long, thrilling whoop that penetrated far through the forest. He divined at once that the pursuit was at hand, not because the warriors had been led there by his trail, which in truth was invisible now, but because some portion of the net they had spread out must in time reach the village.
At daybreak the signal was given, and at the sound of the war whoop the seemingly peaceful Indians were turned suddenly into raging demons who, with tomahawk and torch in hand, sowed destruction and death around. So the land was filled with blood and wailing, pleasant homesteads were laid in ruins, and only heaps of smouldering ashes marked where they had been.
Of course this novice's report lacked whoop and crash and lurid description, and therefore wanted the true ring; but its antique wording was quaint and sweet and simple, and full of the fragrances and flavors of the time, and these little merits made up in a measure for its more important lacks.
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