Графични страници
PDF файл
ePub

"By and by it shall see; it shall eat; ah, ha! but shall speak not!

[graphic]

This the mighty Captain the white men have sent to destroy us!

He is a little man; let him go and work with the women!"

Meanwhile Standish had noted the faces and figures of Indians

Peeping and creeping about from bush to tree in the forest,

Feigning to look for game, with arrows set on

their bow-strings,

Drawing about him still closer and closer the net

of their ambush.

But undaunted he stood, and dissembled and treated them smoothly;

So the old chronicles say, that were writ in the days of the fathers.

But when he heard their defiance, the boast, the

taunt, and the insult,

All the hot blood of his race, of Sir Hugh and of

Thurston de Standish,

Boiled and beat in his heart, and swelled in the

veins of his temples.

Headlong he leaped on the boaster, and, snatching his knife from its scabbard,

Plunged it into his heart, and, reeling backward,

the savage

Fell with his face to the sky, and a fiendlike fierceness upon it.

Straight there arose from the forest the awful

sound of the war-whoop,

And, like a flurry of snow on the whistling wind of December,

Swift and sudden and keen came a flight of

feathery arrows.

Then came a cloud of smoke, and out of the cloud

came the lightning,

Out of the lightning thunder; and death unseen ran before it.

Frightened the savages fled for shelter in swamp and in thicket,

Hotly pursued and beset; but their sachem, the

brave Wattawamat,

Fled not; he was dead. Unswerving and swift had a bullet

Passed through his brain, and he fell with both hands clutching the greensward,

Seeming in death to hold back from his foe the land of his fathers.

There on the flowers of the meadow the warriors lay, and above them,

Silent, with folded arms, stood Hobomok, friend

of the white man.

Smiling at length he exclaimed to the stalwart

Captain of Plymouth :

"Pecksuot bragged very loud, of his courage, his strength, and his stature, —

Mocked the great Captain, and called him a little

man; but I see now

Big enough have you been to lay him speechless before you!"

Thus the first battle was fought and won by the stalwart Miles Standish.

When the tidings thereof were brought to the vil

lage of Plymouth,

And as a trophy of war the head of the brave

Wattawamat

Scowled from the roof of the fort, which at once

was a church and a fortress,

All who beheld it rejoiced, and praised the Lord,

and took courage.

Only Priscilla averted her face from this spectre of terror,

Thanking God in her heart that she had not mar

ried Miles Standish;

Shrinking, fearing almost, lest, coming home

from his battles,

He should lay claim to her hand, as the prize and reward of his valor.

[graphic]
« ПредишнаНапред »