to them, the pearl of manhood squatted above the children s home,
awaiting the cold moment when they should deal pale death.
Here dreaming, though wide-awake, of the exquisite tortures to which
they were to put him at break of day, those confiding savages were
found by the treacherous Hook. From the accounts afterwards supplied by
such of the scouts as escaped the carnage, he does not seem even to
have paused at the rising ground, though it is certain that in that
grey light he must have seen it: no thought of waiting to be attacked
appears from first to last to have visited his subtle mind; he would
not even hold off till the night was nearly spent; on he pounded with
no policy but to fall to. What could the bewildered scouts do, masters
as they were of every war-like artifice save this one, but trot
helplessly after him, exposing themselves fatally to view, while they
gave pathetic utterance to the coyote cry.
Around the brave Tiger Lily were a dozen of her stoutest warriors, and
they suddenly saw the perfidious pirates bearing down upon them. Fell
from their eyes then the film through which they had looked at victory.
No more would they torture at the stake. For them the happy
hunting-grounds was now. They knew it; but as their father s sons they
acquitted themselves. Even then they had time to gather in a phalanx
that would have been hard to break had they risen quickly, but this
they were forbidden to do by the traditions of their race. It is
written that the noble savage must never express surprise in the
presence of the white. Thus terrible as the sudden appearance of the
pirates must have been to them, they remained stationary for a moment,
not a muscle moving; as if the foe had come by invitation. Then,
indeed, the tradition gallantly upheld, they seized their weapons, and
the air was torn with the war-cry; but it was now too late.
It is no part of ours to describe what was a massacre rather than a
fight. Thus perished many of the flower of the Piccaninny tribe. Not
all unavenged did they die, for with Lean Wolf fell Alf Mason, to
disturb the Spanish Main no more, and among others who bit the dust
were Geo. Scourie, Chas. Turley, and the Alsatian Foggerty. Turley fell
to the tomahawk of the terrible Panther, who ultimately cut a way
through the pirates with Tiger Lily and a small remnant of the tribe.
To what extent Hook is to blame for his tactics on this occasion is for
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