W HAT followed was so extraordinary and incredible that I hesitate to record it, lest there be those who, judging in their own conceit, and knowing little of savage Indian nature, may question the truth of my narration. Yet I am now too old a man to permit unjust criticism to swerve me from the task I have assumed.  
The extreme of misery that overwhelmed me at the moment when I beheld my comrade driven forward like a trapped beast to a death by torture, found expression in a sudden moan, which, fortunately for me, was unnoted amid the shouts of greeting that arose around the fire when those gathered there caught sight of the new-comers. Instantly all was confusion and uproar; a scene of savage debauchery, unrelieved by a redeeming feature or a sign of mercy. It was as if poor ? 307 ? De Croix had been hurled, bound and gagged, into a den of infuriated wolves, whose jaws already dripped with the blood of slaughter. Gleaming weapons, glaring and lustful eyes, writhing naked bodies, pressed upon him on every side, hurling him back and forth in brute play, every tongue mocking him, in every uplifted hand a weapon for a blow.
 
The fierce animal nature within these red fiends was now uppermost, fanned into hot flame by hours of diabolical torture of previous victims, in which they had exhausted every expedient of cruelty to add to the dying agony of their prey. To this, fiery liquor had yielded its portion; while the weird incantations of their priests had transformed the most sober among them into demons of malignity. If ever, earlier in the night, their chiefs had exercised any control over them, that time was long since past; and now the inflamed warriors, bursting all restraint, answered only to the war-drum or made murderous response to the superstition of their medicine-men.
 
The entire centre of the encampment was a scene of drunken orgy, a phantasmagoria of savage figures, satanic in their relentless cruelty and black barbarity. Painted hundreds, bedecked with tinkling beads and waving feathers, howled and leaped in paroxysms of fury about the central fire, hacking at the helpless bodies of the dead victims of earlier atrocities, tearing their own flesh, beating each other with whips like ? 308 ? wire, their madly brandished weapons flashing angrily in the flame-lit air.
 
Squaws, dirty of person and foul of mouth, often more ferocious in appearance and cruel in action than their masters, were everywhere, dodging amid the writhing bodies, screaming shrilly from excitement, their long coarse hair whipping in the wind. Nor were they all Pottawattomies: others had flocked into this carnival of blood,—Wyandots and Sacs, even Miamis, until now it had become a contest for supremacy in savagery. 'Twas as if hell itself had opened, to vomit forth upon the prairie that blood-stained crew of dancing demons and shock the night with crime.
 
A dead white man,—the poor lad whose early torture we had witnessed,—his half-burnt body still hanging suspended at the stake, was in the midst of them, a red glare of embers beneath him, the curling smoke creeping upward into the black sky from about his head like devil's incense. In front of this hideous spectacle, regardless of the mutilated body, sat the ferocious old demon I had seen the evening previous, his head crowned with a bison's horns, his naked breast daubed with red and yellow figures to resemble crawling snakes, his face the hideous representation of a grinning skull. Above all other sounds rang out his yells, inciting his fellows to further atrocities, and accompanied by the dull booming of his wooden drum.
 
It was into this pack of ravening beasts that poor ? 309 ? De Croix staggered from the surrounding shadows; and they surged about him, clamoring for place, greeting their new-found victim with jeers and blows and hoots of bitter hatred, viciously slashing at him with their knives, so that the very sight of it turned me sick, and made me sink my head upon my arms in helplessness and horror. A sudden cessation in the infernal uproar led me to peer forth once more. They had dragged the charred and blackened trunk of the dead soldier down from the post where it had hung suspended, and were fastening De Croix in its place, binding his hands behind the support, and kicking aside the still glowing embers of the former fire to give him space to stand. It was brutally, fiendishly done, with thongs wound about his body so tightly as to lift the flesh in great welts, and those who labored at it striking cruel blows at his naked, quivering form, spitting viciously into his face, with taunting words, seeking through every form of ferocious ingenuity to wring from their helpless victim some sign of suffering, some shrieking plea for mercy. Once I marked a red devil stick a sharpened sliver of wood into the Frenchman's bare shoulder, touched it with fir............