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,