How long that slow progress continued I cannot rightly say; but it seemed
to me as if the morning was near at hand when we were arrived, having
miraculously passed such stragglers, scouts, or sentinels as might have
been in the vicinity, at a point where we could have a view of this
particular portion of the encampment.

Three or four hundred Indians were dancing wildly around a huge fire,
while half as many more were feasting, preparing their own food by cutting
it from the carcasses of two oxen which lay near at hand, and broiling it
on the live coals.

I knew sufficient of savage customs to understand that, if there had been
any torturing of prisoners during the evening, such fiendish work was at
an end, and that which we were witnessing was but the ending of the
barbarous sport.

Now it was that I mentally thanked Sergeant Corney for having delayed so
long before starting, for it would have been agony indeed had we been
forced to witness the horrible spectacle of a white man suffering under
the knives and by the fire of these wolves in human form.

We remained there stretched out at full length on the ground, with no
possibility of gaining information which might be of service to us in the
future, ten minutes or more, and then, suddenly, I was forced to exert all
my will-power to prevent a scream of fear from escaping my lips, for what
was unmistakably a human foot had been planted directly upon my leg.

Like a flash, after I succeeded in restraining myself from giving an
alarm, came the knowledge, I know not how, that he who had stumbled upon
me was no less frightened than I, and, clutching Sergeant Corney's leg