Ah me! The meaning of the travails through which we are brought to our better understanding are little known of men--nor will be through many generations of time. In a moment or so the pang was past, and in a sudden flash of unreason--Nature’s compensation for her sorrows--I felt again as I had felt before, that Mademoiselle was at that moment somewhere near--not cold in death--but breathing and living. All this in spite of the ring, the silent evidence of the truth of what had been spoken, which I felt at every breath, against my heart.
We had passed a little below the Fort and had drifted toward a bluff of dunes which jutted out into the stream almost athwart our course--for here the channel runs close to the shore. Upon this point grew a thatch of palmetto scrub and knot of stunted firs and pines, whose gnarled branches stretched this way and that, an impenetrable black tangle against the starlit sky. As we came nearer, the dark blur of the branches took a definite form, and we could mark their gentle sway in the breeze. We were bearing toward a sand bar which jutted well out toward the other shore and I would have spoken of it; but as I turned, Emola seized me by the arm, placing his hand upon his mouth in token of silence. He and the warriors were craning their heads toward the out-spreading branches. They sat mute as statues, saying no word. I could not make it out. Long as I stared I saw no sign or heard no movement save the rhythm of the swaying branches.
The silence was broken by one of the Indians beside me who uttered a hoarse sound in his throat, and lifting his head he passed his index finger grimly around his neck. We drifted in again with the current, and in a moment we understood. There, a horrid plaything for the wind of the sea, its clothing limp and loose, we saw a human body, swinging by the neck!
De Brésac started up. “Par la Mort!” he cried. “The infamous ones! Honest braves, fighting for their King, to be given this dog’s death! Come, Emola, land us here. It is too much, mon ami! He shall not hang so!” He was almost sobbing with the stress of his emotion.
The paddles swept us in to the beach and we climbed the dunes to where the body was hung. Over its head that villain had nailed a piece of white bark upon which had been burned the dreadful confession,