If ye ar’ wanting in spirit, before the eyes of my children will I put ye both to shame!”
The youths who, until now, had detained the hounds, let slip the thongs of skin, by which they had been held, and urged them to the attack by their voices.
But, it would seem, that the elder dog was restrained by some extraordinary sensation, or that he was much too experienced to attempt the rash adventure.
After proceeding a few yards to the very verge of the brake, he made a sudden pause, and stood trembling in all his aged limbs, apparently as unable to recede as to advance.
The encouraging calls of the young men were disregarded, or only answered by a low and plaintive whining.
For a minute the pup also was similarly affected; but less sage, or more easily excited, he was induced at length to leap forward, and finally to dash into the cover.
An alarmed and startling howl was heard, and, at the next minute, he broke out of the thicket, and commenced circling the spot, in the same wild and unsteady manner as before.
“Have I a man among my children?” demanded Esther. “Give me a truer piece than a childish shotgun, and I will show ye what the courage of a frontier-woman can do!”
“Stay, mother,” exclaimed Abner and Enoch; “if you will see the creatur’, let us drive it into view.”
This was quite as much as the youths were accustomed to utter, even on more important occasions, but having given a pledge of their intentions, they were far from being backward in redeeming it.
Preparing their arms with the utmost care, they advanced with steadiness to the brake.
Nerves less often tried than those of the young borderers might have shrunk before the dangers of so uncertain an undertaking.
As they proceeded, the howls of the dogs became more shrill and plaintive.
The vultures and buzzards settled so low as to flap the bushes with their heavy wings, and the wind came hoarsely sweeping along the naked prairie, as if the spirits of the air had also descended to witness the approaching development.
There was a breathless moment, when the blood of the undaunted Esther flowed backward to her heart, as she saw her sons push aside the matted branches of the thicket and bury themselves in its labyrinth.
A deep and solemn pause succeeded.
Then arose two loud and piercing cries, in quick succession, which were followed by a quiet, still more awful and appalling.
“Come back, come back, my children!” cried the woman, the feelings of a mother getting the ascendency.
But her voice was hushed, and every faculty seemed frozen with horror, as at that instant the bushes once more parted, and the two adventurers re-appeared, pale, and nearly insensible themselves, and laid at her feet the stiff and motionless body of the lost Asa, with the marks of a violent death but too plainly stamped on every pallid lineament.
The dogs uttered a long and closing howl, and then breaking off together, they disappeared on the forsaken trail of the deer.
The flight of birds wheeled upward into the heavens, filling the air with their complaints at having been robbed of a victim which, frightful and disgusting as it was, still bore too much of the impression of humanity to become the prey of their obscene appetites.
CHAPTER XIII
A pickaxe, and a spade, a spade,
For,—and a shrouding sheet:
O, a pit of clay for to be made
For such a guest is meet.
—Song in Hamlet.
“Stand back! stand off, the whole of ye!” said Esther hoarsely to the crowd, which pressed too closely on the corpse; “I am his mother, and my right is better than that of ye all!
Who has done this?
Tell me, Ishmael, Abiram, Abner! open your mouths and your hearts, and let God’s truth and no other issue from them.
Who has done this bloody deed?”
Her husband made no reply, but stood, leaning on his rifle, looking sadly, but with an unaltered eye, at the mangled remains of his son.
Not so the mother, she threw herself on the earth, and receiving the cold and ghastly head into her lap, she sat contemplating those muscular features, on which the death-agony was still horridly impressed, in a silence far more expressive than any language of lamentation could have proved.
The voice of the woman was frozen in grief.
In vain Ishmael attempted a few words of rude consolation; she neither listened nor answered.
Her sons gathered about her in a circle, and expressed, after their uncouth manner, their sympathy in her sorrow, as well as their sense of their own loss, but she motioned them away, impatiently with her hand.
At times her fingers played in the matted hair of the dead, and at others they lightly attempted to smooth the painfully expressive muscles of its ghastly visage, as the hand of the mother is seen lingering fondly about the features of her sleeping child.
Then starting from their revolting office, her hands would flutter around her, and seem to seek some fruitless remedy against the violent blow, which had thus suddenly destroyed the child in whom she had not only placed her greatest hopes, but so much of her maternal pride.
While engaged in the latter incomprehensible manner, the lethargic Abner turned aside, and swallowing the unwonted emotions which were rising in his own throat, he observed—
“Mother means that we should look for the signs, that we may know in what manner Asa has come by his end.”
“We owe it to the accursed Siouxes!” answered Ishmael: “twice have they put me deeply in their debt!
The third time, the score shall be cleared!”
But, not content with this plausible explanation, and, perhaps, secretly glad to avert their eyes from a spectacle which awakened so extraordinary and unusual sensations in their sluggish bosoms, the sons of the squatter turned away in a body from their mother and the corpse, and proceeded to make the enquiries which they fancied the former had so repeatedly demanded.
Ishmael made no objections; but, though he accompanied his children while they proceeded in the investigation, it was more with the appearance of complying with their wishes, at a time when resistance might not be seemly, than with any visible interest in the result.
As the borderers, notwithstanding their usual dulness, were well instructed in most things connected with their habits of life, an enquiry, the success of which depended so much on signs and evidences that bore so strong a resemblance to a forest trail, was likely to be conducted with skill and acuteness.
Accordingly, they proceeded to the melancholy task with great readiness and intelligence.
Abner and Enoch agreed in their accounts as to the position in which they had found the body. It was seated nearly upright, the back supported by a mass of matted brush, and one hand still grasping a broken twig of the alders.
It was most probably owing to the former circumstance that the body had escaped the rapacity of the carrion birds, which had been seen hovering above the thicket, and the latter proved that life had not yet entirely abandoned the hapless victim when he entered the brake.
The opinion now became general, that the youth had received his death-wound in the open prairie, and had dragged his enfeebled form into the cover of the thicket for the purpose of concealment.
A trail through the bushes confirmed this opinion.