By this time the Chief had become an interested listener, and had beckoned to the others, who joined the little group and were listening intently to George as he related his adventures with the Red Knives.
"How shall I find words," he said, "to depict the fiendish atrocities perpetrated by that tribe during the months and years which followed. Their greatest cruelty lay in torturing their victim to the verge of insanity, and in stopping short of the final act, which would have proved a most blessed release. Escape was impossible. Suicide, which seemed so desirable, was forbidden by Divine law.
"We had returned to the camp from a hunting excursion one rainy day, and as they always insisted upon having me do the paddling up stream, as well as any other drudgery too difficult for the squaws, I was steaming from having been overheated, and as I was on the verge of exhaustion, fell asleep without sufficient covering, which I was unable to procure; consequently I became a martyr to rheumatism. There I was, helpless, racked with pains which would provoke the mildest of men to an Indian war-dance, and with red-hot joints and swollen limbs.
"After three months of misery among them, I began to suffer many things from many medicine-men, and was nothing better, but rather grew worse. I had nauseous medicines in large doses from one, and small doses from another, with exactly the same results. I was drenched, and steamed, and packed, and baked, externally, and almost poisoned internally with draughts of water which, to say the least, were unclean; but all to no purpose. They blew upon me, and then whistled. They pressed their extended fingers with all their strength into me. They put their forefingers doubled into my mouth, and spouted water from their own mouths into mine. They applied pieces of lighted touchwood to my flesh in many places. They then placed me on a litter made of saplings, and I was carried by four men into the woods, and as I observed one Indian carrying fire, another an axe, and a third dry wood, I could not but conjecture that they had arrived at the humane conclusion of relieving me of all pain forever. When we had advanced a short distance into the woods, they laid me on a clear spot and kindled a fire against my back. Then the medicine-men began to scarify my flesh with blunt instruments.