they had perfected the arts of mutilation in their own right before any Englishman or Spaniard set foot upon this continent. Scalping was an act too deeply embroidered in the fabric of their war customs to have been merely borrowed, and only a sentimentalist would believe the Indian to be less imaginative in this respect than any other race of men.
The eyes of this unfortunate soul, presumably Mr. Bottomley himself, were stark staring open, and his mouth was gape, as if in that final instant he gazed in awe at his gentle green world turned a howling red hell. The droning blowflies swarmed at his lips and nostrils. Seven arrows had penetrated various parts of his body, though none in his heart or lungs—another sign that his death had not been quick. His feet were naked, denoting the theft of his boots. His clothing was singed, but not burnt. The stench of this tragic butchery is a memory that all the roses in Ohio would not avail to erase.
“Poor devil,” Bilbo muttered. Neddy whined. Uncle tried to close those terror-stricken eyes and straighten the body supine on the ground, but rigor mortis defied his efforts. Bilbo, meanwhile, marched up to the smoldering ruin of the station itself and gingerly sifted through the ashes looking for items of utility that the Indians or flames had not already claimed. It was from there, whilst Uncle and I fussed with Bottomley, that I heard the pirate exclaim, simply but ominously, “O, dear…!”
We hurried over. Just beyond the heap of blackened rubble and a smaller gutted outbuilding, Bilbo knelt cradling a woman who yet lived, but who had obviously been the victim of abuses so fiendishly vile as to challenge one’s most cherished precepts of a merciful God. Like her husband, she too had been scalped. A sanguinary trail, sort of an horrific red-black smudge in the weeds, evidenced that she had been carried off some distance by her assailants and then, with a struggle of heroic proportion, had somehow managed to crawl back to the only refuge her mind could conceive—though that refuge had already been destroyed.
Her breathing came in short, weak huffs, like a puppy panting on a hot day. She made no effort to speak. The lower portion of her calico skirt was dyed entirely red with her own blood, while the shoulders were similarly ensanguined from her scalp wound. Uncle knelt beside her, opposite the encradling Bilbo, and tried to give her water from his wooden flask. Moments later, she simply ceased to be, her anguish and woe extinguished along with the life she had lately owned. It was when Bilbo laid her back down upon the earth that we discovered the hidden, obscene, and monstrous torment the savages had inflicted upon her. For, some minutes after she had ceased breathing, we all witnessed a movement ’neath her blood-soaked skirt. At first, we merely glanced at each other in bewilderment. Then, Bilbo, being the least fastidious among us, simply lifted the garment up, and there, between her blood-smudged thighs, protruded the rear half of a baby porcupine, itself desperately struggling for life and freedom. All four of us leaped from the sight of this abomination as though we had glimpsed the very face of all that is unholy. I reeled away, toward the river. A gunshot resounded. I looked back up the bank. There stood Bilbo, his pistol pointed toward the ground, muzzle smoking.
“A curse! A curse!” he shouted into the swollen gray heavens. “A curse, by God’s wrathful hand, on those red devils!”
The words had barely left his mouth when those very heavens opened wide their floodgates and it began to pour.
“To the boat! Back to the boat!” Bilbo shouted at us through the downpour, beckoning with his huge, apelike arm.
“We cannot just leave them to rot,” Uncle protested loudly.
“This is the frontier, sir!” Bilbo shouted back.
“Thou scum! I shall not leave ’til they are buried like Christians.”
Bilbo had already begun wading out to the keelboat with Neddy on his shoulders. Uncle stood fast. The dwarf leaped aboard whilst Bilbo hoisted himself on deck. There he stood, dripping in the downpour, a hand upon the pistol in his sash.
“Come, I say!” he importuned us.
“No,” Uncle shouted back.
Bilbo drew his pistol and held it up.
“I shall count to three,” he said. “Come aboard or rot with them. One….”
“For Godsake!” I pleaded with Uncle, shivering in the cold rain.
“Two….”
“Please!”
“Three.”
Bilbo pulled the trigger. The pistol clicked emptily, its charge already spent upon the porcupine. The villain laughed.
“You contumacious dunderhead!” he shook his fist at Uncle. “Even if we had the leisure to bury those poor wretches, we do not have at hand so much as a shovel!” Bilbo burst out laughing again. Uncle maintained his resolute posture, but glanced about at the ground as though flummoxed.
“We could weight them with stones and commit their bodies to the river,” he suggested. “Thee has claimed to have served in the navy under Captain Jones. Surely thee has heard of burial at sea.”
“At sea one has no choice, sir,” Bilbo riposted. “’Tis a prophylactic measure. Either one carries a stinking corpse on board or one disposes of it. What does it matter if these poor souls are eaten by catfish or worms or buzzards?”
Uncle was already gathering stones.
“All right, all right, by the everlasting cod of Christ! Gather your stones and let’s be done with it!”
And so we bound the poor brutalized Bottomleys in shrouds of burlap, weighted them with stones, and committed their bodies to the confluence of the two rivers with a few words of consecration, that they might meet their Lord and Savior in a better world than this one.
4
Notwithstanding one’s being held captive by the likes of such offal as Bilbo; or of stumbling upon a scene of barbarous murder such as that terrible aftermath at Bottomley’s Station; or of being, in general, defenseless in the midst of a vast and hostile wilderness filled with unfriendly savages and roaring beasts—there is no occupation so easy and restful as floating down a great river on a keelboat. By the converse, there are few occupations so tedious as poling such a craft against the current.
We departed the dolorous site of pillage and murder and made upstream on the Dismal. The[O4] turgid progress, but in those stretches where the river narrowed between brooding, tree-topped clay bluffs, our labor was arduous. Uncle and I would stand at the prow of Megatherium, brace our poles against the river bottom, and, leaning against said poles, walk to the rear of the boat along the narrow deck, or runway. Then: up poles, a quickstep back to the bow, and the same hard procedure over and over and over. Bilbo stationed himself on the cabin roof, one jaundiced eye clapped upon us, the other scouring the shadowy banks or bluffs for signs of Indians, pistols at hand, Neddy and Bessie seated beside him with a brace of rifles and supply of ball, powder, and patches, ready to reload. And always, held fast between Bilbo’s bootheels and the wooden crate that served as his throne, was a specimen jar of Monongahela whiskey.
Hardly a moment went by that I did not expect a hail of arrows to issue from those drear bosky banks, but I was to be happily disappointed in this respect. For though the river teemed with life—with deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and elk (Cervus elaphus) drinking at the water’s edge; bear (Ursus americanus) with cubs frisking on the sandbars; raccoon (Procyon lotor) grubbing daintily for insect provender upon the shore; otter (Lutra canadensis) and whelps sliding comedically down their chutes as though for the sheer pleasure of it; heron (Ardea herodias) and crane (Grus americana) winging majestically overhead; ducks of two dozen species plying the eddies with their chicks in flotilla; wolves (Canis occidentalis) baying in the distance, and songbirds lilting by the multitude in the verdure—for all this teeming of life, it was our good fortune not to cross paths with that most dangerous denizen of the forest: man.
Nights, we anchored offshore, and though our commander tried to establish a shift of watches ’twixt himself and the dwarf, it was a pretense soon abandoned, for I would wake in my bindings in the morning