He had
saved Beverley and sent him back to her.
With a start and a chill of dread, she thought: "What if it is
already too late!"
But her nature could not hesitate. To feel the demand of an
exigency was to act. She snatched a wrap from its peg on the wall
and ran as fast as she could to the fort. People who met her
flying along wondered, staring after her, what could be urging her
so that she saw nobody, checked herself for nothing, ran splashing
through the puddles in the street, gazing ahead of her, as if
pursuing some flying object from which she dared not turn her
eyes.
And there was, indeed, a call for her utmost power of flight, if
she would be of any assistance to Long-Hair, who even then stood
bound to a stake in the fort's area, while a platoon of riflemen,
those unerring shots from Kentucky and Virginia, were ready to
make a target of him at a range of but twenty yards.
Beverley, greatly handicapped by the fact that the fresh scalp of
a white man hung at Long-Hair's belt, had exhausted every possible
argument to avert or mitigate the sentence promptly spoken by the
court martial of which Colonel Clark was the ruling spirit. He had
succeeded barely to the extent of turning the mode of execution
from tomahawking to shooting. All the officers in the fort
approved killing the prisoner, and it was difficult for Colonel
Clark to prevent the men from making outrageous assaults upon him,
so exasperated were they at sight of the scalp.
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