"Ugh!" exclaimed the Indian, as he bent his wild, panther-like eye on the black giant with a look of undisguised astonishment, which gradually darkened into a smile of ferocious joy and triumph.
"U-gooh!" exclaimed the negro, as he fixed his wild, ox-like eye unflinchingly on the red giant, but with a look of unspeakable amazement, which gradually vanished, leaving his face with a cast as impenetrable as black marble.
Having surveyed his captive from top to toe in exulting silence for some moments, Black Thunder turned abruptly on his heel and strode away, to be seen no more that morning. Burl was still staring after his old acquaintance when his young master, who had with some surprise witnessed the dumb-show of mutual recognition, came up and inquired what it meant. Burl explained, and having noticed the ugly smile with which he had been regarded, could not help foreboding the terrible fate that must await them if their lives lay at the mercy of that revengeful savage whom he had once made bite the dust.
By this time the allied English and Indian armies were all astir, and the disorderly retreat began afresh, Tecumseh keeping his Indian brigade half a mile in the rear of the regulars. Toward the middle of the afternoon the party that had the white prisoners in keeping, having gradually fallen behind the line of march, abruptly turned into the mouth of a dingle which, deep and shadowy, opened gloomily into the valley of the Thames. Here, for the first time since morning, our luckless hunters spied Black Thunder, where a little farther within the dingle, as if there in waiting for them, he was vehemently, though not loudly, haranguing some fifteen or twenty of his warriors who, clustered in a close red knot before him, were taking in with ravenous ears his every word. Evidently the evil, foreboded by Burl in the morning, was in some shape near at hand, for a fierce gesture flung toward them from time to time by the speaker, with the vengeful glances of his listeners in the same direction, told but too plainly the drift of the harangue. At length, as if to make the surer of their savage sympathies and give the climax to his barbarous appeal, Black Thunder suddenly threw back his robe and disclosed to view two scars--a deep and ugly one in the arm, a long and ghastly one athwart the breast. Whereat uprose a chorus of yells expressive not so much of savage sympathy as of savage delight. The moment after, seized foot, with brush-wood to feed the devouring flames heaped up against him to his shoulders, there stood Big Black Burl, a victim doomed to the fiery tortures of the death-stake.