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Richard Jennifer, carelessly profane as all men were in that most godless day, would say 'twas the old borderer's way of swearing; that since he left out the oaths in common speech, as, truly, he did, he would fetch up the arrears and wipe out the score in one fell blast upon his knees.
I recognized that I was to be the subject of those hellish tortures which the Indians use, the tales of which are on every Borderer's lips. And yet I did not recognize it fully, or my courage must have left me then and there. My imagination was still limping, and I foresaw only a death of pain, not the horrid incidents of its preparation.
The sharp crack of the old borderer's rifle filled the momentary pause, and a British officer in a colonel's uniform swayed drunkenly in his saddle and plunged headlong in the stream.
I noted that he paid but small heed to either De Croix or myself, contenting his vengeance with sharp kicks at our prostrate bodies; but as he came to Burns, he paused, bending down till he could peer into the old borderer's upturned face. "Bah! I know you," he said, brokenly. "You Ol' Burns. Stake down in village for you."
A still burlier Prussian from Tübingen, however, appeared at last, and so carved our valiant borderer's face, that thereafter with its criss-cross scars it looked like a well-frequented skating-ground. Football, too, in America probably kills and maims more in a year than all the German duels.
The wood itself was not more immovable than the dark object, until the report of the borderer's musket was heard, and then it came tumbling to the earth like an insensible mass. "Fallen like a stricken bear from his tree! Life was in it, or no bullet of mine could have loosened the hold!" exclaimed Dudley, a little in exultation as he saw the success of his aim.
"Well, now; I'll be daddled if this here ain't about the beatin'est thing I ever chugged up ag'inst," was the old borderer's comment, when we had flogged our wits to small purpose in the search for some clue to the mystery. "What's your mind about it, hey, Chief?" Uncanoola shook his head. "Heap plenty slick. No go up-stream, no go down, no cross over, no go back. Mebbe go up like smoke w'at?"
A moment later the twang of a bow-string buzzed upon the breathless noontide stillness, and Jennifer clutched and dragged me down in good time to let the arrow whistle harmless over us. Then, like a distorted echo of the buzzing bow-string, the sharp crack of the old borderer's rifle rang out smartly, setting the cliff-crowned mountain side all a-clamor with mocking repetitions.
His imagination supplied the imperfect links in the story: he could well believe that the same hands which had shed the blood of every member of the poor borderer's family, might have struck the hatchet into the head of the resisting husband and father; and that the effects of that blow, with the desolation of heart and fortune which the heavier ones, struck at the same time, had entailed, might have driven him to the woods, an idle, and perhaps aimless, wanderer.
It may have been a thousand times as long. Men did live in caves several hundred thousand years ago. A book that Mr. Pennypacker has says so." "If the book says it, I reckon it's so," said Long Jim, with the borderer's sublime faith in the printed word. "The man of that time was a big, hairy fellow. He didn't have even bows and arrows. He fought with a stone club or ax of stone."
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