They seemed to have suffered a considerable loss in the battle, twelve being the whole number now to be seen; and most of these, judging from the fillets of rags and bundles of green leaves tied about their limbs, had been wounded, two of them to all appearance very severely, if not mortally, for they lay upon the earth a little apart from the rest, in whose motions they seemed to take no interest.

As Roland approached, he looked in vain amid the throng for his kinswoman.  Neither she nor Telie Doe was to be seen.  But casting his eye wildly around, it fell upon a little grove of trees not many yards off, in which he could perceive the figures of horses, as well as of a tall barbarian, who stood on its edge, as if keeping guard, wrapped, notwithstanding the sultriness of the weather, in a blanket, from chin to foot, while his head was as warmly invested in the ample folds of a huge scarlet handkerchief.  He stood like a statue, his arms folded on his breast, and lost under the heavy festoons of the blanket; while his eyes were fastened upon the group of Indians on the road-side, from which they wandered only to glare a moment upon the haggard and despairing visage of the soldier.  In that copse, Roland doubted not, the savages had concealed a hopeless and helpless captive, the being for whom he had struggled and suffered so long and so vainly, the maid whose forebodings of evil had been so soon and so dreadfully realised.

In the meanwhile, the Indians on the road-side began the business for which they had assembled, that seemed to be, in the first place, the division of spoils, consisting of the guns, horses, and clothes of the dead, with sundry other articles, which, but for his unhappy condition, Roland would have wondered to behold:  for there were among them rolls of cloth and calico, heaps of hawks’-bells and other Indian trinkets, knives, pipes, powder and ball, and other such articles, even to a keg or two of the fire-water, enough to stock an Indian trading-house.  These, wherever and however obtained, were distributed equally among the Indians by a man of lighter skin than themselves,—­a half-breed, as Roland supposed,—­who seemed to exercise some authority among them, though ever deferring in all things to an old Indian of exceedingly fierce and malign aspect, though wasted and withered into the semblance of a consumptive wolf, who sat upon a stone, buried in gloomy abstraction, from which, time by time, he awoke, to direct the dispersion of the valuables, through the hands of his deputy, with exceeding great gravity and state.