something weird and awful in the look of that set, savage face,
and the tone of that Indian chant. Brave as they were, Henry and
the shiftless one felt fear, as perhaps they had never felt it
before in their lives. Well they might! They were destined to
behold this woman again, under conditions the most awful of which
the human mind can conceive, and to witness savagery almost
unbelievable in either man or woman. The two did not yet know
it, but they were looking upon Catharine Montour, daughter of a
French Governor General of Canada and an Indian woman, a
chieftainess of the Iroquois, and of a memory infamous forever on
the border, where she was known as "Queen Esther."

Shif'less Sol shuddered again, and whispered to Henry:

"I didn't think such women ever lived, even among the Indians."

A dozen warriors followed Queen Esther, stepping in single file,
and their manner showed that they acknowledged her their leader
in every sense. She was truly an extraordinary woman. Not even
the great Thayendanegea himself wielded a stronger influence
among the Iroquois. In her youth she had been treated as a white
woman, educated and dressed as a white woman, and she had played
a part in colonial society at Albany, New York, and Philadelphia.
But of her own accord she had turned toward the savage half of
herself, had become wholly a savage, had married a savage chief,
bad been the mother of savage children, and here she was, at
midnight, striding into an Iroquois camp in the wilderness, her
head aflame with visions of blood, death, and scalps.

The procession passed with the terrifying female figure still