The dances had a peculiar rhythm that grew heavier and faster, just as the songs and the drums became louder and swifter. It was a rhythm so firm and heavy that it set the earth to throbbing beneath the feet of the onlookers; and as the drumming and the threatening songs increased in speed, there was somehow a corresponding quickening in the heartbeats of us who listened.

The faces of the dancers, hideously painted to begin with, were more and more contorted as the dances became more swift; and so, too, did the warriors gesture more and more ferociously with their tomahawks.

The songs rose to a crescendo and ended in a scream so violent that the scalp crawled. Only by an exercise of self-control could a spectator keep from howling with excitement that was half anger and half eagerness to fight anything and anybody. It was a performance from which the senses shrank, dismayed; yet in it was a horrible contagion.

All night these tireless red men danced and whooped and ate; and in the morning, after we had eaten our fill of sturgeon boiled with wild rice, the canoes were launched and we all moved off in a body into the narrow bay to the music of unending distant thunder.

Langlade, a bald, huge-shouldered, squat man in a canoe with Gautier, led us; and it was a wild company that followed—a hundred and fifty warriors, gleaming with paint and feathers, all singing in a mournful minor key. Our flotilla was surrounded by the canoes of relatives and friends, who wailed a discordant accompaniment; while along the shore ran the rest of those who had come from distant nations, howling dolorous farewells.

From the foremost canoes came slow musket-fire; and amid that slow thudding and a final lugubrious yowling we took up our long journey to the eastward.

L

TO ME that journey was like the turning of a wheel—a wheel beneath which we had once been caught and crushed, and which now, as it slowly began to turn back, still weighed hard upon us.

We had been in torment when carried into captivity, beneath the gray skies of autumn. We should have been elated now, with gleaming June clouds above us, and waterways calmly blue between fields and forests: yet we were not, because of the fate that awaited us three at the end of our long journey, unless we escaped before Langlade and Gautier reported us to Lanaudiere, as they inevitably would.

Always our canoe traveled in the rear; for no sooner had Gautier told Langlade about us than Langlade put Sponge-belly in charge of the rear guard, making it impossible for us to race on ahead and escape. It was the place of honor, Langlade told Sponge-belly; but from Sponge-belly’s glumness, as we moved eastward at the tail-end of the flotilla, we knew he considered our position a reflection on himself.