“Them that don’t believe in hell, will natterly go agin the devil,” muttered the renegade, with strong signs of disapprobation; and then added earnestly,—­“Look you, Squire, you’re a man that knows more of things than me, and the likes of me.  You saw that ’ere Injun, dead, in the woods under the tree, where the five scouters had left him a living man?”

“Ay,” said the man of the turban; “but he had been wounded by the horseman you so madly suffered to pass the ambush at the ford, and was obliged to stop from loss of blood and faintness.  What so natural as to suppose the younker fell upon him (we saw the tracks of the whole party where the body lay), and slashed him in your devil’s style, to take advantage of the superstitious fear of the Indians?”

“There’s nothing like being a lawyer, sartain!” grumbled Doe.  “But the warrior right among us, there at the ruin?—­you seed him yourself,—­marked right in the thick of us!  I reckon you won’t say the sodger, that we had there trapped up fast in the cabin, put the cross on that Injun too?”

“Nothing more likely,” said the sceptic;—­“a stratagem a bold man might easily execute in the dark.”

“Well, Squire,” said Doe, waxing impatient, “you may jist as well work it out according to law that this same sodger younker, that never seed Kentucky afore in his life, has been butchering Shawnees there, ay, and in this d—­d town too, for ten years agone.  Ay, Dick, it’s true, jist as I tell you:  there has been a dozen or more Injun warriors struck and scalped in our very wigwams here, in the dead of the night, and nothing, in the morning, but the mark of the Jibbenainosay to tell who was the butcher.  There’s not a cussed warrior of them all that doesn’t go to his bed at night in fear; for none knows when the Jibbenainosay,—­the Howl of the Shawnees,—­may be upon him.  You must know, there was some bloody piece of business done in times past (Injuns is the boys for them things!)—­the murdering of a knot of innocent people—­by some of the tribe, with the old villain Wenonga at the head of ’em.  Ever since that, the Jibbenainosay has been murdering among them; and they hold that it’s a judgment on the tribe, as ondoubtedly it is.  And now, you see, that’s jist the reason why the old chief has turned such a vagabond; for the tribe is rifled at him, because of his bringing such a devil on them, and they won’t follow him to battle no more, except some sich riff-raff, vagabond rascals as them we picked up for this here rascality, no how.  And so, you see, it has a sort of set the old feller mad:  he thinks of nothing but the Jibbenainosay,—­(that is, when he’s sober, though, cuss him, I believe it’s all one when he’s drunk, too.)—­of hunting him up and killing him, for he’s jist a feller to fight the devil, there’s no two ways about it.  It was because I told him we was going to the woods on Salt, where the crittur abounds, and where he might get wind of him, that he smashed his rum-keg, and agreed to go with us.”