More and more murderous and terrible grew the wrath of his tormentors, as this stream of vituperation fell on their ears. Again and again weapons were lifted to slay him, but Snoqualmie put them back.
"He can suffer more yet," he said; and the words were like a glimpse into the cold, merciless heart of the man. Other and fiercer tortures were devised by the chief, who stood over him, pointing out where and how the keenest pain could be given, the bitterest pang inflicted on that burned and broken body. At last it seemed no longer a man, but a bleeding, scorched, mutilated mass of flesh that hung to the stake; only the lips still breathed defiance and the eyes gleamed deathless hate. Looking upon one and another, he boasted of how he had slain their friends and relatives. Many of his boasts were undoubtedly false, but they were very bitter.
"It was by my arrow that you lost your eye," he said to one; "I scalped your father," to another; and every taunt provoked counter-taunts accompanied with blows.
At length he looked at Snoqualmie,--a look so ghastly, so disfigured, that it was like something seen in a horrible dream.
"I took your sister prisoner last winter; you never knew,--you thought she had wandered from home and was lost in a storm. We put out her eyes, we tore out her tongue, and then we told her to go out in the snow and find food. Ah-h-h! you should have seen her tears as she went out into the storm, and----"
The sentence was never finished. While the last word lingered on his lips, his body sunk into a lifeless heap under a terrific blow, and Snoqualmie put back his blood-stained tomahawk into his belt.
"Shall we kill the other?" demanded the warriors, gathering around the surviving Bannock, who had been a stoical spectator of his companion's sufferings. A ferocious clamor from the women and children hailed the suggestion of new torture; they thronged around the captive, the children struck him, the women abused him, spat upon him even, but not a muscle of his face quivered; he merely looked at them with stolid indifference.
"Kill him, kill him!" "Stretch him on red hot stones!" "We will make _him_ cry!"
Snoqualmie hesitated. He wished to save this man for another purpose, and yet the Indian blood-thirst was on him; chief and warrior alike were drunken with fury, mad with the lust of cruelty.