They flung him down upon his knees beside the captain's horse, and
though I caught but here and there a word above the frenzied yipping of
the Indians, it was plain the baronet was asking him of me.

I could not hear the black boy's gibbering answers, but that he would
not tell them what they wished to know--could not, indeed, since I had
left no word behind to track me by--was quickly evident. A cord was
found, and while I crouched behind the holly screen, aghast and helpless
as one against two-score or more, they looped him by the thumbs and
swung him up to dangle from a maple bough a musket's length or such a
matter before the cabin door.

He bore the torture patiently, as some poor dumb beast suffering at the
hand of man, and would not part his lips for all the captain's curses.
But this was only the merciful beginning. With yells of savage fury the
Indians carried brands to make a slow fire at his feet; and, lest that
should not be enough, a brace of them climbed to the roof, tore off the
splits for kindling, and set the cabin wall alight behind him.

You may thank God, my dears, that you are living in a kindlier age.
Mayhap the savage, now a-march toward the setting sun, is still as
pitiless as he was; but not in any corner of the world, I think, would
Anglo-Saxon men, wearing the king's or any other uniform, be witnesses
unmoved of such a devil's carnival of torment as this that made me
nauseate with horror.

As with the stretching of the cord the wretched black spun slowly round
and round before the growing blaze, his cries were something terrible to
hear. And when the fire light played upon his face it was a sight to
freeze the blood: the eyes shut tight against the shriveling heat, the