Chapter XXVIII: The Might at the Long House

The silence of consternation gripped the hordes of the Keepers of the Trail. The sea of painted, scowling faces exhibited one frozen expression of awe at the suddenness of the tragedy. Only Murray gave no indication of feeling as he knelt by de Veulle's side.

"Where is Black Robe?" I whispered to Marjory, shivering on my shoulder.

"He went away last night. There was a call from Ga-o-no-geh, a village down the Trail. I think he was tricked."

"Would he----"

Murray stood up, wiping a spot of blood off one of his hands with a laced handkerchief.

"He is gone," he remarked impartially. "'Twas no more than to be expected. A man can not mix politics with women--especially uncivilized women."

"Give a look to the Indian girl," I urged.

He shrugged his shoulders as if to say it was not worth while; but Marjory stooped over Ga-ha-no, composed the disordered black tresses and closed the wildly staring eyes.

"'Tis useless, Harry," she said. "She is dead."

"Ga-ha-no--is--dead!" repeated Ta-wan-ne-ars blankly.

His heaving muscles relaxed, and he hung limp in his bonds against the stake.

"At the least, the woman gave you an avenue of escape from an intricate problem," commented Murray. "You do not seem glad, my dear."

"I am not glad," retorted Marjory scornfully. "And I am right content that you should be unable to understand why I will be mourning for her."

"Ah, well, we have never understood each other, have we?" rejoined Murray, taking snuff absent-mindedly. "Come, we will give orders for the removal of the unfortunate pair, and----"

The horror dawned once more in Marjory's face.

"And what!" she gasped.

"You forget, Marjory, that my savage henchmen have work to do," he answered nonchalantly. "I take it for granted that you do not wish to remain and view their labors?"

"You--you would----"

Emotion shocked her; but she fought for her self-control.

"You would leave these--these men--Master Ormerod--to--to----"

"And why not!" he replied. "They are enemies. As I have had occasion to tell him ere this, Master Ormerod has sought to contrive my ruin. Why should I spare him?"

"You know not the meaning of humanity, then!" she cried, anger striving with terror for control of her voice.

"'Tis a word which has divers meanings," he said. "But I am a reasonable man. I am always willing to discuss terms."

"And what might you mean by terms?" I demanded, taking a hand in the conversation.

He deliberated as unconcernedly as if we sat on opposite sides of a table in London, entirely ignoring the huddled corpses at his feet, the line of bodies stiffening in the bitter cold against the stakes and the attendant cordon of Indians whose faces studied his as their fingers itched to resume the torture.

"An undertaking to abandon this wholly barren persecution of my enterprises," he decided. "I should require the signature of Governor Burnet to the document."

"And my companions here?" I asked curiously.

"You forget that even my powers are necessarily limited," he said. "I could not possibly snatch from my people's vengeance Iroquois warriors taken red-handed in an attempt to massacre them."

I laughed.

"You do not yet know me, Murray."

"Possibly you are subject to education," he retorted, buttoning up his greatcoat. "Come, Marjory."

She drew away from him.

"I choose to remain," she said coldly.

"I choose that you shall not."

He waved his hand in unmistakable signal of release to the watchful False Faces and their followers. A yell of satisfaction swelled from their hungry throats, and they dashed forward. Indeed, so violent was their reaction from the restraint just imposed upon them that in the first mad rush a number of the younger men were carried beyond control of the evil priests and commenced to butcher the Senecas outright with knife and tomahawk.

Marjory shrank back and covered her eyes with her hands as a feather-tufted warrior ran up to Ta-wan-ne-ars and dangled a freshly severed scalp in his face.

"'Twill be difficult for me to control them at all in a few moments," observed Murray.

"Oh, you vile coward!" exclaimed Marjory, her own courage now regained. "I am steeped in shame whenever I remember that I have in my veins blood that is akin to yours."

"You are unreasonable, my mistress," he remonstrated. "I am giving the young man a chance for his life."

He addressed me directly.

"You will bear me out, Master Ormerod, that I warned you life on the frontier was not pretty. We who deal with savages must employ measures designed to strike their imaginations. We can not be overdainty. We----"

He looked up in amazement, as a mantle of silence enveloped the Council-Place for the second time.

"O my people," boomed a harsh voice in the Cahnuaga dialect, "verily Ha-ne-go-ate-geh has claimed you! You are mad! You toy with your enemies here when the warriors of the Long House are as thick along the Doom Trail as the falling leaves of Autumn. The Keepers who were on watch are dead or in flight. At any minute the Iroquois will be here. They have burned Ga-o-no-geh. The snow of the Trail is trampled flat by their multitudes. Aye, the Doom Trail is bringing doom upon its Keepers."

The tall, severe figure of Black Robe pushed through the surrounding masses of renegades until he had reached Marjory's side.

"What have they done to you, my daughter?" he asked kindly, his tone changing as if by magic. "I was led away by a false story."

She pointed down at the corpses of Ga-ha-no and de Veulle. Père Hyacinthe made the sign of the cross and muttered a brief prayer.

"Providence works mysteriously," he sighed. "Once I trusted this man--" and he swung around with stern hostility upon Murray--"and this one here. Now I think I know them for what they were, servants of evil who employed the force of God's holy Word in the furtherance of their own wicked plans.

"France is great, my daughter. France has a destiny before her. But her greatness and her destiny may not be reached through by-paths of sin and evil-doing."

He would have said more, but Murray intervened.

"I will answer your personal comments at a future time, sir," he said; "but do I understand you to say that the Doom Trail has been penetrated by the Iroquois?"

"They are almost at your door," replied Black Robe sternly.

"'Sdeath!" swore Murray. "This is too much!"

He raised his voice in a shout.

"To your arms, O Keepers of the Trail! The Iroquois are upon us!"

But his words were drowned in a racket of firing from the heart of the Evil Wood. A number of the False Faces emerged from the shelter of the firs, their awful masks wabbling unsteadily.

"The People of the Long House!" they wailed. "The People of the Long House are come!"

"We are attacked back and front," snarled Murray. "Well, Master Ormerod, you and your friend the chief are excellent hostages."

He bellowed a series of commands which brought some degree of order out of the confusion, and dispatched one party of Keepers into the Wood to resist the attack from that quarter. Another body he sent through the village to hold the approaches of the Doom Trail. Under his directions the remainder of the warriors unbound the surviving prisoners from the stakes and escorted us to the stockaded house in which he dwelt.

As we passed the chapel we saw Black Robe standing in the doorway. His eyes were fixed upon the heavens.

"You were a chosen people!" he cried. "You were the few selected from the many! The Word of God was brought to you, and you saw the light--or said you did. Your feet were set upon the narrow way. A great work was given you to do.

"But you wandered far afield, back into unexplored realms of the ancient wickedness of your race. You became devil-worshipers in secret; aye, eaters of human flesh. You lived a life of deceit. You became tools of Ha-ne-go-ate-geh.

"Great was your fall, and great will be your punishment therefor. You will be torn up, root and branch. You will be banished from your villages and exiled to a strange country. Your warriors will die under the tomahawk, your children will be reared by your enemies. You will perish, O Keepers of the Trail! Your end is----"

Cowering under the whip-lashes of his words, the Keepers hurried by the chapel, and ran us inside the stockade. In the doorway they paused to await the coming of Murray. He arrived presently, with Marjory hanging unwillingly on his arm.

"The prisoners?" he rasped in answer to the question of our guards. "Take them to the cellar. Look to their security if you value your lives."

An echo of distant shouts reached our ears as we stood there, and across the posts of the stockade we saw the Keepers streaming from the Evil Wood and at their heels certain darting, quick-moving figures that we knew must be the warriors of the Eight Clans.

"It is time to bring our women and children inside the stockade," proposed one of the Cahnuagas.

Murray shook his head.

"We have not room nor food to spare," he refused with iron determination.

Discontent showed in the faces of the Keepers, for even these fiends knew the instinct of domestic affection; but Murray cut off attempts at protestation.

"See," he said, as the sound of firing came from the southward, "we are surrounded. We are ignorant of the strength of the Iroquois. It may be all we can do to defend ourselves. Women and children would be so many inconveniences to us."

And whilst a squad of savages conducted us to our prison the rest manned the firing-platforms around the stockade and prepared to cover the retreat of the Keepers, who were falling back rapidly before the hard-driving attacks of the Iroquois.

I sought for a word with Marjory as we entered the door, but Murray deliberately strode between us. All I gained was a glance from her eyes that bade me be strong and confident. And I needed all the strength and confidence I could obtain during that dreadful afternoon and night in the cellar, with the shouts of the opposing sides and the discharges of their muskets the sole tidings to reach us of what went on above.

Ta-wan-ne-ars sat with his back to a wall, his eyes fixed on vacancy, his lips murmuring at intervals Ga-ha-no's name. I tried to interest him in what went on without success. He looked at me, and turned his eyes away.

In desperation I struggled with two of our eight surviving comrades to untie our bonds, and after hours of trial we succeeded and released the others. This permitted me to pay attention to those who had been injured. One had a broken shoulder, the result of a blow from a war-club the night we were captured. One had been partially scalped at the stake, and three had been hacked and cut in the preliminary stages of torture.

We slept little that night, for we were very cold and we had no food. But in the morning the Keepers thrust a pan of corn-mush within the door and we ate it to the last kernel. I forced a portion upon Ta-wan-ne-ars, feeding him with a stick we found on the floor.

After that we slept for several hours, and then a lanthorn gleamed on the stairs and Murray stepped into our midst, an immaculate periwig on his head, his linen spotless, his brown cloth suit as fresh as if direct from the tailor's hands.

He set the lanthorn on the dirt floor and stood beside it.

"A good morrow to you, Master Ormerod," he began. "I have come to hold counsel with you."

"'Tis more than kind," I observed sarcastically.

"Nay, 'tis no more than a proposition of business," he returned coolly. "Look you, my friend, we each of us have that which the other wants. In such a case sensible men come to terms."

"If I remember rightly you were speaking of terms only yesterday," I said dryly.

"True, and naturally I was not then disposed to yield you much."

"I would not trust you now on any terms," I said flatly.

"Tut, tut, sir. Is that language for one gentleman to employ to another?"

"You are not a gentleman, sir; you are----"

He glowered.

"Have a care, sir," he warned.

"You are a scoundrel," I finished.

He made a gesture of magnificent disdain.

"Let it pass, let it pass. Your opinion, Master Ormerod, is of little moment to me. What I seek is an accommodation of our mutual desires."

"As how?"

He pursed his lips.

"Look you, Master Ormerod," he replied, "I have you fast here. I have also the chief, your friend. I have in addition one you love."

"Before you proceed further," I interrupted, "I wish you to answer me one question: Whose child is she!"

He hesitated, and regarded me sidewise.

"Oh, well," he said after a moment, "it might as well out now as later. She'd tell you herself, I suppose. The maid is the child of my sister."

"And her name!"

"She is a Kerr of Fernieside," he answered pompously. "I should add, sir, that I have been at particular pains with the girl, having an especial affection for her."

"Oh," I murmured politely. "An especial affection!"

"Even so."

He bowed elegantly.

"I have treated her as my own daughter. Her father was lost in the '15, and since then, seeing that her mother was dead, I have made her my charge. She hath been well educated in a dame's school in Edinburgh."

"Well, of that we will say no more," I said. "I find it unpleasant to hear you talk of her."

He frowned, but made no reply.

"You consider us as hostages, then?" I continued.

"Yes. I might as well admit to you that I am surrounded here. The Iroquois have sent out the largest war-party ever I saw."

"You are helpless, but you attempt to impose terms," I said.

"Pardon me, sir; I am not helpless," he objected. "If the worst comes to the worst I shall give intelligence to my opponents of my intent to blow up my house and my hostages and undertake to fight a way through the Iroquois. Better a death in such fashion than captivity and disgrace, let alone the torture-stake."

I considered this, and gauged him as capable of doing all that he said.

"Yes," I assented finally; "being what you are, you have advantages on your side. What are your terms?"

"A safe-conduct for me and my people to Canada."

"So that you may restore your trade again?"

A look of sorrow fitted over his face.

"I can not restore it, Master Ormerod. That fact is indisputable. My one hold upon public opinion was my success and the power it gave me. Let me fail and lose my power, and my influence is dead."

"Yes," I agreed; "that is true."

"Moreover," he went on, "my savages are killed or scattered. My organization is gone. My most valuable servants are slain."

"And Mistress Marjory?"

He regarded me oddly.

"Do you care to sue for her hand?" he parried.

"I shall wed her, if she pleases," I responded; "but I do assure you, sir, I have no intent to approach you in the matter."

"You make a grave mistake then. I should like to settle upon her a jointure proportionate to her birth and heritage."

My first sensation of amusement was turned to ridicule.

"Murray," I said, "you seem not to understand that honest men and women want nothing of your bloody, ill-gotten money. I know that Mistress Marjory will uphold me in this. All we ask of you is that you should disappear, erase yourself."

He flushed, but had himself in hand immediately.

"You have insulted me more than enough, sir," he said with dignity. "Let us end this interview. Are you prepared to go outside the stockade and secure consent to the terms we have discussed, giving your word of honor to return here afterwards?"

I bowed.

"I will do so, but first permit me to acquaint my companions."

And as rapidly as I could I informed the Senecas of the upshot of our talk. All heard it with relief, save Ta-wan-ne-ars. His sombre eyes looked through and beyond me.

"My Lost Soul!" was his response. "I must seek my Lost Soul, brother!"

"In time," I assured him gently. "Do you bide here and await me, and presently you shall go hence and seek her if you wish."