communicated with one another by gestures,
which expressed their conviction that the victim
was asleep by his fire inside. In another
moment they drew their bowstrings, placing
themselves so that their double fire of arrows should
meet at right angles in the tent.

The man whose life they were seeking never
felt that life so dear to him as at the moment
when he saw them shoot five arrows into the
place where he slept. Still he watched and
waited; for his existence now depended on his
cunning and patience, on his not miscalculating,
by an instant, the time to fire. He saw the
savages pause and listen before they ventured
into the tent. One of them then dropped his
bow, grasped his tomahawk, and knelt to creep
under the curtained opening; while the other
stood over him with his arrow in the string
ready to shoot. In this position, the skull of
the kneeling Indian was brought within the
white man's line of sight; and he cocked his
rifle. Faint as the click was, he saw that it
had caught their quick ears—for they both
started and turned round. Observing that this
movement made the kneeling man less likely to
escape his eye in the tent, he shifted his aim,
and fired at the naked breast of the man with
the bow. The sharp eye of the savage discovered
his hidden enemy at the same instant,
and he sprang aside. But it was too late—he
was hit; and he fell with a scream that went
through every nerve of Mr. Möllhausen's body.
The other savage jumped to his feet; but the
white man's weapon was the quicker of the
two, and a discharge of buckshot hit him full in
the face and neck. He dropped dead on the
spot, by the side of the other man who was still
groaning.

Although he knew that he had justifiably
shot, in self-defence, two savages, whose
murderous design on his own life had been betrayed
before his eyes—although he was absolutely
certain that if either one of the Pawnees had
been permitted to escape, the whole tribe would
have been at the tent by the next day—the
brave traveller's nerve deserted him when he
saw his two enemies on the ground, and when he
thought of the terrible after-necessity of hiding
what had been done. With a feeling of unutterable
despair he mechanically reloaded his rifle,
and approached the place. The groans of the
Indian who had been shot in the breast moved
his pity so strongly that they seemed to recal
him to himself. First turning the dead Indian
face downwards, to escape the horrifying sight
of the mangled features, he approached his
wounded enemy, and made signs that he would
forgive him, help him, cover him with buffalo
skins, take him into the tent, and there do all
that was in the power of man to gain his good-
will by preserving his life.

The savage lay writhing and bleeding with
his teeth clenched, with his eyes glaring in
deadly hatred through the long black hair that
almost covered his face. But, after a while,
the merciful white man saw that his gestures
were understood. A sense of relief, even of
joy, overflowed his heart at the prospect of
saving the Indian, and of securing a companion
in his fearful solitude. The wounded man
signed to him to come nearer, and pointed with
his left hand to his right hand and arm, which
lay twisted under him. Without the slightest
suspicion, Mr. Möllhausen knelt over him to
place his arm in an easier position. At the
same moment, the wretch's right hand flashed
out from beneath him, armed with a knife, and
struck twice at the unprotected breast of the
man who was trying to save him. Mr.
Möllhausen parried the blows with his right arm,
drew his own knife with his left hand, and
inflicted on the vindictive savage the death that he
had twice deserved. The rattle sounded in the
throat, and the muscles of the naked figure
stretched themselves in the last convulsion.
The lost traveller was alone again; alone in the
frozen wilderness, with the bodies of the two
dead men.

The night was at hand—the night came—a
night never to be forgotten, never in any mortal
language to be described. Down with the
gathering darkness came the gathering wolves;
and round and round the two corpses in front of
the tent they circled and howled. All through
that awful night the lost man lay listening to
them in the pitch darkness, now cooling his
wounded arm with snow, now firing his pistol
to scare the wolves from their human prey.

With the first gleam of daylight he rose to
rid himself of the horrible companionship of the
bodies, and of all that betrayed their fate,
before the next wandering Indians came near
the spot, and before the wolves gathered again
with the darkness. Hunger drove him to begin
by taking their provision of dried buffalo-meat
from under the dead men's leathern girdles. He
then rolled up their remains, with whatever lay
about them, in their buffalo robes, tied them
round, dragged them, one after the other, to
the hole in the ice where he got his water, and
pushed them through it, to be carried away by
the current of the river.

Even yet, the number of his necessary precautions
was not complete. He had a large fire to
make, next, on the spot where the two savages had
dropped, with the double object of effacing all
traces of their fall, and of destroying the faintest
scent of blood before the wolves collected again.
When the fire had dwindled to a heap of ashes,
a new snow-storm smoothed out all marks of
it. By the next morning not a sign was left to
betray the deaths of the Indians—the smooth
ground was as empty and as white as ever—and
of all that had happened, on that memorable
sixteenth day of the traveller's sojourn in the
wilderness, nothing now remained but the terrible
recollection of it.

The time wore on from that date, without an
event to break the woeful monotony of it, until
Christmas came. He was still alive in his solitude
on Christmas-day. A stolid apathy
towards the future had begun to get possession of
him; his sense of the horror of his situation
grew numbed and dull; the long solitude and