He was bound hand and foot, and with cruel tightness, for with that
tiny slipping of his muscles there set up all through him such a
tingling and aching as was almost unbearable.
His head seemed a lump of lead, glued to whatever it lay upon, and big
as a buttertub.
Turning his eyes far as he could to the right, he looked long in that
direction. Faintly, after a while, he picked out the straight line of
the stockade top, the rising tower at the corner. The line of the wall
faded out in darkness the other way, strain as he might. To the left
were the ragged tops of the tepees, their two longer sticks pointing
above the others.
From the sound of the river, he must be between it and the stockade
gate.
Presently his numbed hearing became conscious of a sound somewhere
near, a sound that had rung so ceaselessly since his waking that it had
seemed the background for the lesser noise of the sentry's slipping
moccasin. It was the weird, unending, unbeginning wail of the women,
the death-song of the tribe mourning the passing of a chief, the voices
of some four hundred squaws blending indescribably.
McElroy listened.
With consciousness of that his mind grew clearer and he began to think.
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