As for Roland himself, the words and actions of the girl,—­though they might have awakened suspicions, not before-experienced, of her good faith, and even appeared to show that it was less to unlucky accident than to foul conspiracy he owed his misfortunes,—­did not, and could not, banish the despair that absorbed his mind, to the exclusion of every other feeling.  He seemed even to himself to be in a dream the sport of an incubus, that oppressed every faculty and energy of spirit, while yet presenting the most dreadful phantasms to his imagination.  His tongue had lost its function; he strove several times to speak, but tongue and spirit were alike paralysed.  The nightmare oppressed mind and body together.

It was in this unhappy condition, the result of overwrought, feelings and intolerable bodily suffering, that he was led by his Piankeshaw masters down the hill to the river, which they appeared to be about to pass; whilst the chief body of marauders were left to seek another road from the field of battle.  Here the old warrior descended from his horse, and leaving Roland in charge of the two juniors, stepped a little aside to a place where was a ledge of rocks, in the face of which seemed to be the entrance to a cavern, although carefully blocked up by masses of stone, that had been but recently removed from its foot.  The Piankeshaw, taking post directly in front of the hole, began to utter many mournful ejaculations, which were addressed to the insensate rock, or perhaps to the equally insensate corpse of a comrade concealed within.  He drew also from a little pouch,—­his medicine-bag,—­divers bits of bone, wood, and feathers, the most valued idols of his fetich, which he scattered about the rock, singing the while, in a highly lugubrious tone, the praises of the dead, and shedding tears that might have been supposed the outpourings of genuine sorrow.  But if sorrow it was that thus affected the spirits of the warrior, as it seemed to have done on several previous occasions, it proved to be as easily consolable as before, as the event showed; for having finished his lamentations, and left the rock, he advanced towards Roland, whom he threatened for the third time with his knife; when one of the younger Indians muttering a few words of remonstrance, and pointing at the same time to the keg of fire-water on the horse’s back, his grief and rage expired together in a haw-haw, ten times more obstreperous and joyous than any he had indulged before.  Then mounting the horse, seemingly in the best humour in the world, and taking the end of the cord by which Roland was bound, he rode into the water, dragging the unfortunate prisoner along at his horse’s heels; while the younger Piankeshaws brought up the rear, ready to prevent resistance on the soldier’s part, should he prove in any degree refractory.