The Pirates of the Prairies: Adventures in the American Desert

CHAPTER XXV
THE TORTURE

The Apaches, who had been fastened for a long time to the stakes at which they would be tortured, regarded the terrible preparations for their atrocious punishment with a calm eye, and not a muscle quivering in their stoical and indifferent faces. So great was their carelessness, or, at any rate, it appeared so, that you might have fancied that they were merely about to figure as spectators in the gloomy tragedy preparing, although they were destined to play so terrible a part in it.

So soon as Valentine left him, Unicorn ordered the torture to commence, but he suddenly altered his mind.

"My sons," he said, addressing the Comanche warriors, and pointing to Black Cat; "this man is a chief, and as such can claim an exceptional death, in which he can prove to us his constancy and courage under suffering. Send him to the happy hunting grounds in such a way that the warriors of his nation whom he meets in another life may give him a reception worthy of him. Tomorrow the old men and chiefs will assemble round the council fire, to invent a punishment meet for him. Take him from the stake."

The Indians frenziedly applauded these words, which promised them so attractive a spectacle for the morrow.

"The Comanches are boasting and cowardly women," Black Cat broke out; "they do not know how to torture warriors. I defy them to make me utter a groan, if the punishment lasted a whole day."

"The Apache dogs can bark," Unicorn said coldly; "but if their tongue is long, their courage is short; tomorrow, Black Cat will weep like a daughter of the palefaces."

Black Cat shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, and the Comanches repeated their frenzied applause.

"Unfasten him," Unicorn commanded a second time.

Several warriors approached the Apache chief, cut the cords that bound him to the stake, and then secured his limbs and threw him at the foot of a tree, Black Cat not deigning to make a sign evidencing the slightest irritation. After exchanging a glance with Valentine, Unicorn placed himself at the head of a band of warriors, who formed a semicircle round the prisoners. The chieftainess placed herself opposite to him, with the women; the band struck up more noisily than ever, and the torture began.

The squaws and warriors danced round the prisoners, and in passing before them, each, whether a man or woman, cut off a strip of flesh with long, sharp scalping knives. In making these wounds, the Comanches employed the utmost precaution to prevent the knives running too deep into the flesh, lest the victims should run the chance of dying at once, which would have unpleasantly modified the intention of the Indians, by depriving them of a sight from which they promised themselves so much pleasure.

The Apaches smiled on their torturers, and excited them still more by telling them that they did not know how to treat their prisoners; that their wounds were only so many mosquito stings; that the Apaches were far more skilful; and that the many Comanche prisoners they had made endured in their tribe much more atrocious sufferings.

The unfortunate men were in a pitiable state: their bodies were only one wound, from which the blood streamed. The Comanches grew excited and rage seized upon them, on hearing the insults of their enemies. A woman rushed all at once on one of the prisoners whose words were the bitterest, and with her sharp and curved talons tore out his eyes, which she swallowed on the spot, saying to him —

"Dog, you shall not see the sun again."

"You have torn out my eyes, but left me my tongue," the prisoner replied, with a smile rendered more hideous by the two empty and bleeding sockets. "'Twas I who devoured the quivering heart of your son, Running-water, when he entered my calli to steal horses. Do what you please, I am revenged beforehand!"

The woman, exasperated by this last insult, rushed upon him and buried her knife in his heart. The Apache burst into a hoarse laugh, which suddenly changed into the death rattle, and fell a corpse while uttering the words —

"I said truly that you do not know how to torture your prisoners – dogs, rabbits, thieves!"

The Comanches doubled their fury on the wretched victims, incessantly hacking and stabbing them, and though the majority were dead already, they did not leave off till they had destroyed all appearance of humanity. The scalps were then raised, and the victims thrown into the fire prepared for them.

The Comanches danced and howled round this fire until their voice and strength failed them, and they fell exhausted, in spite of the drums and chichikouis. The men and women, stretched on the ground pell-mell, soon fell asleep, in that strange state of intoxication produced by the odour of the blood shed during this atrocious butchery.

Valentine, despite the almost insurmountable disgust this scene had occasioned him, did not wish to retire, as he feared lest Black Cat might be massacred by the Comanches in a moment of mad fury. This precaution was not vain: several times, had he not resolutely interfered, the Apache chief would also have been sacrificed to the hatred of his enemies, who had attained a paroxysm of fury impossible to describe.

When the camp was plunged in silence, and everybody asleep, Valentine proceeded cautiously in the direction where the Apache chief lay bound, who watched him come up with a very peculiar glance. Not saying a word, the hunter, after assuring himself that nobody was watching his movements, cut all the cords that bound him. The Apache bounded like a jaguar, but fell back again on the ground; the cords had been tied so securely that they had entered into his flesh.

"My brother must be prudent," the Frenchman said gently. "I wish to save him."

He then took his flask and poured a few drops of brandy on the pallid lips of the chief, who gradually recovered, and at length stood on his feet. Bending a searching glance on the man who so generously paid him attentions he was far from expecting, he asked in a hoarse voice —

"Why does the pale hunter wish to save me?"

"Because," Valentine answered, without hesitation, "my brother is a great warrior in his nation, and must not die. He is free."

And holding out his hand to the chief, he helped him to walk. The Indian followed him unresistingly, but without a word. On reaching the spot where the horses of the tribe were picketed, Valentine selected one, saddled it, and led it to the Apache, who, during the hunter's short absence, had remained motionless on the same spot.

"My brother will mount," he said.

The warrior was still so weak that Valentine was compelled to help him into the saddle.

"Can my brother keep on his horse?" he asked, with tender solicitude.

"Yes," the Apache answered, laconically.

The hunter took the gun, bow, and panther skin quiver of the chief which he handed to him, saying gently —

"My brother will take back his arms. A great warrior as he is must not return to his tribe like a timid woman; he should be able to kill a stag, if he met one on the road."

The Indian seized the weapons; a convulsive tremor ran over his limbs, and joy gained the victory over Indian stoicism. This man, who had faced a horrible death without change of countenance, was conquered by the Frenchman's noble conduct; his granite heart was softened; a tear, doubtless the first he had ever shed, escaped from his fever parched eyes, and a sob burst from his overcharged breast.

"Thanks," he said, in a choking voice, so soon as words could find their way to to his lips; "thanks, my brother is good, he has a friend."

"My brother owes me nothing," the hunter replied, simply; "I act as my heart and my religion order me."

The Indian remained pensive for a moment, then he muttered, shaking his head dubiously:

"Yes, I have heard that said before, by Father Seraphin, the Chief of Prayer of the palefaces. Their God is omnipotent, He is before all merciful; is not that a blessing?"

"Remember, chief," Valentine quietly interrupted him, "that I save your life in the name of Father Seraphin, whom you seem to know."

The Apache smiled softly.

"Yes," he said, "these are his words, 'Requite good for evil.'"

"Remember those divine precepts which I put in practice today," Valentine exclaimed, "and they will support you in suffering."

Black Cat shook his head.

"No," he said, "the desert has its own laws, which are immutable; the red skins are of a different nature from the palefaces: their law is one of blood, and they cannot alter it. Their law says: 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' The maxim is derived from their fathers, and they are obliged to submit to it, and follow it; but the redskins never forget an insult or a kindness. Black Cat has a great memory."

There was a silence of some minutes, during which the two men regarded each other attentively. At length the Apache spoke again.

"My brother will lend me his gourd."

The hunter gave it to him; the Apache quickly raised it to his lips, and took a mouthful. Then, bending down to Valentine, he placed his hands on his shoulders, and kissed him on the lips, while allowing a portion of the fluid he held in his mouth to pass into the hunter's.

On the prairies of the Far West this ceremony is a species of mysterious initiation, and the greatest mark of attachment one man can give another. When two men have embraced in this way, they are henceforth friends, whom nothing can separate save death, and they help one another without hesitation under all circumstances.

Valentine knew this, and hence, in spite of the disgust he internally experienced, he did not oppose the action of the Apache chief. On the contrary, he yielded to it joyfully, comprehending the immense advantages he should, at a later date, derive from this indissoluble alliance with one of the most influential Apache sachems, those allies of Red Cedar, on whom he had sworn to take an exemplary revenge.

"We are brothers," Black Cat said, gravely. "Henceforth, by day or night, wherever the great pale hunter may direct his footsteps, a friend will constantly watch over him."

"We are brothers," the hunter replied; "Black Cat will ever find me ready to come to his assistance."

"I know it," said the warrior. "Farewell; I will return to the warriors of my tribe."

"Farewell," Valentine said.

And vigorously lashing his horse, the Apache Chief started at full speed, and soon disappeared in the darkness. Valentine listened for a moment to the echo of his horse's hoofs on the hardened ground, and then returned thoughtfully to the calli, in which Ellen was nursing White Gazelle.

CHAPTER XXVI
TWO WOMEN'S HEARTS

Ellen felt moved with pity at the sight of this young and lovely woman, who lay on the floor of the hut, and whom life seemed to have quitted forever. She felt for her, although she never remembered to have seen her before, a sympathy for which she could not account, and which instinctively attracted her.

Who was this woman? How had she, still so young, become mixed up in these scenes of murder and associated with these savage prairie men, to whom every human being is an enemy, every valuable article a booty? Whence arose this strange ascendancy which she exerted over outlaws, whom she made cry like children?

All these thoughts crossed Ellen's mind, and heightened, were that possible, the interest she felt in the stranger. And yet, in her heart, a vague fear, an undefinable presentiment warned her to be on her guard, and that this woman, gifted with, a strange character and fatal beauty, was an enemy, who would destroy her happiness forever.

As Ellen was one of those rare women for whom evil sentiments did not exist, and who made it a principle to obey, under all circumstances, the impulse of her heart, without reflecting on the consequences that might result from it, she silenced the feeling of revolt within her, and bent over White Gazelle.

And with that exquisite tact, innate in the female heart, she sat down by the side of the sufferer, laid her beautiful head on her knees, loosened her vest, and gave her that busy attention of which the other sex alone possess the secret.

The two maidens, thus grouped on the uneven floor of a wretched Indian hut, offered an exquisite picture. Both deliciously lovely, though of different beauty – for Ellen had the most lovely golden locks ever seen, while the Gazelle, on the contrary, had the warm tint of the Spanish woman, and hair of a bluish black – presented the complete type, in two different races, of the beau-ideal of woman, that misunderstood and incomprehensible being, the fallen angel in whose heart God seems to have let fall a glorious beam of His divinity, and who retains a vague reminiscence of that Eden which she made us lose.

The American woman, that perfect whole, a composition of graces, volcanic and raging passions, angel and demon, who loves and hates simultaneously, and who makes the man she prefers feel in the same second the joys of paradise and the nameless tortures of the Inferno! Who could even analyze this impossible nature, in which virtue and vices, strangely amalgamated, seem to personify the terrible convulsions of the soil on which she lives, and which has created her?

For a long time, Ellen's cares were thrown away. White Gazelle remained pale and cold in her arms. The maiden began to grow alarmed. She knew not to what she should have recourse, when the stranger made a slight movement, and a faint ruddiness tinged her cheeks. She uttered a profound sigh, and her eyelids painfully rose. She looked round her in amazement, and then closed her eyes again.

After a moment, she opened them once more, raised her hand to her brow as if to dissipate the clouds that obscured her mind, fixed her eyes on the person who was attending to her, and then, with a frown and quivering lips, she, tore herself from the arms that entwined her, and, bounding like a panther, sought shelter in one of the corners of the hut, without ceasing to gaze fixedly at the young American, who was startled at this strange conduct, and could not understand it.

The two girls remained thus for a few seconds, face to face, devouring each other with their eyes, but not exchanging a syllable. No other sound could be heard in the hut, save the panting respiration of the two females.

"Why do you shun me?" Ellen at length asked in her harmonious voice, soft as the cooing of a dove. "Do I frighten you?" she added, with a smile.

The Spaniard listened to her as if she did not catch her meaning, and shook her head so passionately that she broke the ribbon confining her hair, which fell in thick ringlets over her white shoulders, and veiled them.

"Who are you?" she asked, impetuously, with an accent of menace and anger.

"Who am I?" Ellen replied, in a firm voice, in which a slight tinge of reproach was perceptible. "I am the woman who has just saved your life."

"And who told you I wished it to be saved?"

"In doing so, I only consulted my own heart."

"Oh, yes, I understand," the Gazelle said, ironically. "You are one of those women called in your country Quakeresses, who spend their life in preaching."

"I am nothing of the sort," Ellen said, softly. "I am a woman who suffers like yourself, and whom your misfortunes affect."

"Yes, yes," the Spaniard shrieked, as she writhed her hands despairingly, and burst into tears – "I suffer all the torments of hell."

Ellen regarded her for a moment with compassion, and walked towards her. "Do not cry, poor girl!" she said to her, mistaking the cause that made her shed tears. "You are in safety here. No one will do you any harm."

The Spaniard threw up her head haughtily.

"Nay!" she said, impetuously. "Do you fancy, then, that I am not in a condition to defend myself, were I insulted? What need have I of your protection?"

And, roughly seizing Ellen's arm, she shook her passionately as she said: —

"Who are you? What are you doing here? Answer!"

"You, who were with the bandits when they attacked this village, should know me," Ellen replied, drily.

"Yes, I know you," the Spaniard said presently, in a hoarse voice. "You are the woman whom the genius of evil brought across my path to rob me of all my happiness! I did not expect to find you here, but I am delighted at doing so, for I can at length tell you how I hate you," she added, stamping her foot passionately. "Yes, I hate you!"

Ellen, in her heart, was alarmed at the stranger's violence; she tried in vain to explain her incomprehensible words.

"You hate me!" she replied, softly. "For what reason? I do not know you. This is the first time that accident has brought us together. Up to this day, we never had any relations together, near or remote."

"Do you think so?" the Spaniard continued, with a cutting smile. "In truth," she added, "we never had any relations together. You are right, and yet I know you thoroughly. Miss Ellen, daughter of the squatter, the scalp hunter, the bandit, in a word, Red Cedar, and who dares to love Don Pablo de Zarate, as if you did not belong to an accursed race. Have I forgotten aught – are those all your titles? Answer, will you?" she said, thrusting her face, inflamed with passion, close to Ellen's, and shaking her violently by the arm.

"I am, indeed, Red Cedar's daughter," Ellen answered, coldly; "but I do not understand what you mean by your allusion to Don Pablo de Zarate."

"Do you not, innocent lamb!" the Spaniard retorted with irony.

"And supposing it were so," the American answered with some haughtiness, "what does it concern you? By what right do you cross-question me?"

"By what right?" the Spaniard said, violently, but suddenly checked herself, and, biting her lips till the blood came, she folded her hands on her breast, and, surveying Ellen with a glance full of the utmost contempt, she continued: —

"In truth, you are an angel of purity and gentleness; your life has passed calmly and softly at the hearth of honest and respectable parents, who inculcated in you at an early age all the virtues they practice so well – ah, ah! Is not that what you meant to say to me? – while I, who am an associate of brigands, who have spent my whole life on the prairie, who understand nothing of the narrow exigencies of your paltry civilisation, who have always breathed the sharp and savage air of liberty – by what right should I come to interfere in your family arrangements, and interfere in your chaste loves, whose sentimental and insipid incidents are so well regulated by feet and inches? You are right, I cannot, with my savage manner, and burning heart, cross your love, and destroy for a caprice all your combinations – I am, indeed, mad," she added, as she rudely repulsed the maiden.

She folded her arms on her chest, and leant against the wall of the hut in silence. Ellen looked at her for a while, and then said, in a soft and conciliating voice —

"I try in vain to understand your allusions, but if they refer to any fact effaced from my mind, if, under any circumstance, I may have unconsciously offended you, I am ready to offer you all the apologies you may require. Our position among these ferocious Indians is too critical for me not to try, by all means in my power, to draw more closely together the bonds of friendship between ourselves, the only representatives of the white race here, which alone can enable us to escape the snares laid for us, and resist the attacks that threaten us."

The Spaniard's face had gradually lost the hateful and wicked expression that disfigured it, and her features had become calmer. Now that she had reflected, she repented the imprudent words she had uttered on the first outburst of passion. She would have liked to recall her secret; still she hoped that it was not too late to do so; and with that craft innate in woman, and which renders her so dangerous under certain circumstances, she resolved to deceive her companion, and efface from her mind the bad impression which her foolish words must have left there.

Hence it was with a smile, and in her softest voice, that she answered the American —

"You are good-hearted; I am not worthy of the attention you have paid me, or of the gentle words you address to me, after what I dared to say to you. But I am more unfortunate than wicked. Abandoned when a child, and adopted by the bandits with whom you saw me, the first sounds that struck my ear were cries of death, the first light I saw was the glare of incendiary fires. My life has been passed in the desert, far from the towns, where people learn to grow better. I am an impetuous and obstinate girl; but, believe me, my heart is good; I can appreciate a kindness, and remember it. Alas! A girl in my position is more to be pitied than blamed."

"Poor child!" Ellen said, with involuntary emotion, "So young, and already so unhappy."

"Oh, yes, most unhappy," the Spaniard went on; "I never knew the sweetness of a mother's caresses, and the only family I have had is composed of the brigands, who accompanied the Apaches when they attacked you."

The girls remained seated side by side, with their arms intertwined and head on each other's shoulder, like two timid doves. They talked for a long time, describing their past life. Ellen, with the candour and frankness that formed the basis of her character, allowed her companion to draw from her all her secrets, harmless as they were, not perceiving that the dangerous woman who held her beneath the charm of her blandishments, continually excited her to confidence, while herself maintaining the utmost reserve.

The hours passed thus rapidly, nearly the whole night slipped away in their confessions, which did not terminate till sleep, which never surrenders its sway over young and animated people, closed the drooping eyelids of the American girl.

The Spaniard did not sleep; when the other maiden's head fell on her chest she raised it cautiously, and laid it delicately on the skins and furs arranged to act as a bed; then, by the flickering and uncertain light of the pinewood torch fixed in the ground, which lit up the hut, she gazed long and attentively on the squatter's daughter.

Her face had lost its placid mask and assumed an expression of hatred of which such lovely features would have been thought incapable; with frowning brow, clenched teeth, and pallid cheeks, as she stood before the maiden, she might have been taken for the genius of evil, preparing to seize the victim which it holds fascinated and gasping beneath its deadly glance.

"Yes," she said, in a hollow voice, "this woman is lovely; she has all needed to be beloved by a man. She told me the truth – he loves her! And I," she added, with a movement of rage, "why does he not love me? I am lovely too – more lovely than this one, perhaps. How is it that he has been at least twenty times in my presence, and his heart has never been warmed by the fire that flashed from my eyes? Whence comes it that he has never noticed me, that all my advances to make him love me have remained futile, and that he has never thought of anyone but the woman lying asleep there, who is in my power, and whom I could kill if I pleased?"

While uttering these words she had drawn from her girdle a small stiletto, with a blade sharp as the tongue of a cascabel.

"No!" she added, after a moment's reflection, "No, it is not thus that she must die! She would not suffer enough. Oh, no! I mean her to endure all the sufferings that are lacerating me. Jealousy shall torture her heart as it has done mine for so long. Voto a Dios! I will avenge myself as a Spanish woman should do. If he despise me, if he will not love me, neither of us shall have him; we shall both suffer, and her torture will alleviate mine. Oh! Oh!" she said, with a smile, as she walked round the sleeping girl with the muffled tread of a wild beast; "fair-haired girl, with lily complexion, your cheeks covered with the velvety down of a peach, will ere long be as pale as mine, and your eyes, red with fever, will no longer find tears to soothe them."

She bent over Ellen, attentively listened to her regular breathing, and certain that she was plunged in a deep sleep, she walked toward the curtain door of the hut, raised it cautiously, and after looking around her in the obscurity, feeling assured by the calmness that surrounded her, she stepped over the body of Curumilla, who was lying across the door, and started off hurriedly, but with such light steps that the most practised ear could not have noticed the sound.

The Indian warrior had taken on himself the duty of watching over the two women. When the scalp dance was ended he returned to install himself at the spot he had selected, and, in spite of the remarks of Valentine and Don Pablo, who assured him that they were in safety, and it was unnecessary for him to remain there, nothing could make him give up his resolution.

Phlegmatically shaking his head at his friend's remarks, he took off his buffalo robe without any further response; he stretched it on the ground, and lay down on it, wishing them good night with a brief but peremptory nod. The others, seeing the Araucano's immoveable resolve, philosophically went away, shaking their heads.

Curumilla was not asleep – not one of the Spanish girl's movements escaped him; and she had scarce gone ten yards when he was already on her trail, watching her carefully. Why he did so he was himself ignorant; but a secret foreboding warned him to follow the stranger, and try to learn for what reason, instead of sleeping, she traversed at so late an hour the camp in which she was a prisoner, and where she consequently exposed herself to come in contact at each step with a ferocious enemy, who would have killed her with delight.

The reason that made her brave so imminent a danger must be very powerful, and that reason the Indian chief determined on knowing.

The girl had difficulty in finding her way through this inextricable labyrinth of huts and tents, against which she stumbled at every step. The night was dark; the moon, veiled under a dense mass of clouds, only displayed its sickly disc at lengthened intervals; not a star gleamed in the sky.

At times the girl halted on her journey, stretching forth her hand to listen to any suspicious sound, or else returned hurriedly on her footsteps, turning in the same circle, while careful not to go far from Ellen's hut.

It was evident to Curumilla that the prisoner was seeking, though unable to find, a tent that contained the person she wished to speak with. At length, despairing probably of ever succeeding in this search of which she did not hold the thread, the girl stopped and imitated twice the snapping bark of the white coyote of the Far West. This signal, for it was evidently one, succeeded better than she expected, for two similar barks, uttered at points diametrically opposed, answered her almost immediately. The girl hesitated for a second; a dark flush passed over her face, but recovering at once, she repeated the signal.

Two men appeared simultaneously at her side – one, who seemed to rise out of the ground, was Red Cedar, the second, Pedro Sandoval.

"Heaven be praised!" the Spaniard said, as he pressed the girl's hand, "You are saved, Niña, and I fear nothing more now. Canarios! You may flatter yourself with having caused me a terrible fright."

"Here I am," said Red Cedar; "can I be of any service to you? We are ambushed a few steps from here, with two hundred Apaches; speak, what is to be done?"

"Nothing at present," the Gazelle said, as she returned the pressure of her two friends' hands. "After our ill success of this evening, any attempt would be premature, and fail. At daybreak, from what I have heard, the Comanches will set out to take up your trail. Do not let their war party out of sight. It is possible that I may require your help on the way; but till then do not show yourself; act with the greatest prudence, and before all try to keep your enemies in ignorance of your movements."

"You have no other recommendations to give me?"

"None; so retire; the Indians will soon wake up, and it would not be well for you if they surprised you."

"I obey."

"Above all, do what I told you."

"That is agreed," Red Cedar repeated.

He glided into the gloom and disappeared among the tents. Curumilla was inclined to follow him and kill him as he fled; but after a short hesitation he allowed him to escape.

"It is now your turn," the Gazelle continued, addressing Sandoval; "I have a service to ask of you."

"A service, Niña; say rather an order to give me; do you not know that I am happy to please you in everything?"

"I am aware of it, and feel grateful to you, Pedro; but this time what I have to ask of you is so important and so serious, that, in spite of myself, I hesitate to tell you what I expect from you."

"Speak without fear, my child, and whatever it may be, I swear to you to do it."

"Even if the life of a person were at stake?" she said, with a bright and fixed glance, resembling that of a wild beast.

"All the worse for him: I would kill him."

"Without hesitation?"

"Yes. Has anyone insulted you, my child? If so, point him out to me, that you may be the sooner avenged."

"What I would ask of you is worse than killing a man."

"I do not understand you."

"I wish – you understand me clearly, my dear Pedro? – I wish that on the road we should escape – "

"If it is only that, it is easy."

"Perhaps so! But that is not all."

"I am listening."

"When we escape, you must carry off and take with us the girl to whom you entrusted me last evening."

"What the deuce would you do with her?" the pirate exclaimed, astonished at this singular proposition, which he was far from expecting.

"That is my business," the Gazelle answered rudely.

"Of course, still it seems to me – "

"After all, why should I not tell you? There is, I think, in a country a long distance from here, a savage and ferocious race called the Sioux?"

"Yes, and they are precious scoundrels, I can assure you, señorita; but I do not see what connection there is – "

"You shall see," she sharply interrupted him. "I wish that the girl you carry off tomorrow shall be handed over as a slave to the Sioux."