“Stop! you dogs! Away with you! Stop! I say!” He stood over the body with his drawn sword while they glowered at him, and would have struck him down had not Satouriona come between. At last the Paracousi, with a few words, sent them away, their gruesome fancies ungratified.
It was a dog’s death for so valiant a man--pulled down like some wild beast of the forest. When I had been carried to where the body lay, De Brésac and I vowed he should have a decent burial. I hated him, and hate him now. But it was a passion made great by the intensity of it, and I could not bear that the majesty of his prowess should be dimmed by any ignominy at his death. De Brésac, fearing to bury him in the knowledge of the Indians, gave orders to the seamen that he should be taken to Fort San Mateo. When I had bound up my leg, thither we presently repaired, I leaning upon the arms of Job Goddard and Brésac.
And so it was all over. The mission of De Gourgues was ended. However bloody the retribution he had wrought upon his enemies, France was avenged. I was thankful that my flight into the woods had spared me much of the butchery at Fort San Mateo; what we saw in the forest was horrible enough, and though by the time we returned the Fort had been cleared, a dreadful climax to this grim tragedy was being enacted.
As we entered the postern gate we saw De Gourgues standing,--menacing, sinister and pitiless,--before the ranks of trembling, haggard wretches who had been spared from the massacre. They were not many; and the slenderness of their number was a dire augury of the punishment which was to be theirs. They did not know what was to come. They scanned the merciless man who stood before them, seeking to find in the lines of his face one trace of sorrow or pity. But the eyes where pity might have been were set and fixed; hard as the lines of the nose and mouth. The brows had lost their melancholy and were drawn into a tangle and snarl of wrinkles, which took away every vestige of the man I knew and loved. He returned their look with a glance from which they cowered as though he had struck them; a glance that meant but one thing, and that was--the end. A few of them stood upright and fearless; others fell down upon their knees, whimpering. The end--Holy Virgin! What end? What death? When the Avenger spoke, his voice was dry and hard as flint.