With little trouble I found the wagon against which I had seen Mademoiselle draw back her horse in that last desperate defence.  It was overturned, scorched with flame, its contents widely scattered; while about it lay the bodies of men, women, and children.  A single hasty glance at most of these was sufficient; but a few were so huddled and hidden that I was compelled to move them before I thoroughly convinced myself that Mademoiselle was not there.  I finally found her horse, several rods away, lying against the sand-ridge; but she whose body I sought with such fond persistency was not among those mangled forms.

Faint and sick from the awful scene, with head throbbing painfully, I sank down upon a slope of sand where I was able to command a clear view in either direction, and thought rapidly.  I was alone with the dead.  Of all those lying silent before me, none would stir again.  Not a savage roamed the stricken field,—­though doubtless they would again swarm down upon it as soon as the sacking of the Fort had been completed.  I must plan, and plan quickly, if I would preserve my own life and be of service to others.  And life was worth preserving now, for there was a possibility,—­faint, to be sure, yet a possibility,—­that Toinette still lived.  How the mere hope thrilled and animated me! how like a trumpet-sound it called to action!  She had told me once of friendships between her and these blood-stained warriors; of weeks passed in Indian camps on the great plains, both with her father and alone; of being called the White Queen in the lodges of Sacs, Wyandots, and Pottawattomies.  Perchance some such friendship may have intervened to save her, even in that fierce melee, that carnival of lust and murder.  Some chief, with sufficient power to dare the deed, may have snatched her from out the jaws of death, actuated by motives of mercy,—­or, more likely still, have saved her from the stroke of the tomahawk for a far more terrible fate.

This was the thought that brought me again to my feet with burning face and tightly clinched teeth.  If she lived, a helpless prisoner in those black lodges yonder, there was work to be done,—­stern, desperate work, that would require all my courage and resourcefulness.  Firm in manly resolve, and rendered reckless now of contact with the dead, I crept back among the bodies in eager search for gun and ammunition.  For a long time I sought vainly; the field had been stripped by many a vandal hand.  At last, however, I turned over a painted giant of a savage whose head had been crushed with a blow, and beneath him discovered a long rifle with powder-horn half filled.  As I drew it forth, uttering a cry of delight at my precious find, my eyes fell upon a pair of bronze boots, with long narrow toes, protruding from beneath a tangled mass of the slain.  It was no doubt the tomb of De Croix; and without so much as a thought that he could be alive, I drew the bodies off him and dragged his form forth into the sunlight.