So I denied her at the bridge....

And from that moment has my unseen pilot walked beside me, and I know he leads me swiftly to my end." I raised my troubled eyes and glanced toward my Indians.

They had stripped great squares of bark from half a dozen trees, and were busily painting upon them, in red and blue, insulting signs and symbols--a dead tree-cat, scalped, and full of arrows; a snake severed into sections; a Seneca tied to a post and a broken wampum belt at his feet.
And on every tree they had also painted the symbol of their own clans and nation--pointed stones and the stars of the Pleiades; a witch-wolf and an enchanted bear; a yellow moth alighted on a white cross; a night-hawk, perfectly recognizable, soaring high above a sun, setting, bisecting the line of the horizon.
Every scalp taken was duly enumerated and painted there, together with every captured weapon.

Such a gallery of art in the wilderness I had never before beheld.
Boyd's riflemen sat around, cross-legged on the moss, watching the Indians at their labour--all except Murphy and Elerson, who, true to their habits, had each selected a tree to decorate, and were hard at work with their hunting knives on the bark.
On Murphy's tree I read: "To hell with Walter Butler." Elerson, who no doubt had scraped the outlines of this legend with his knife-point before Murphy carved it, had produced another message on his own tree, not a whit more complimentary: "Dam Butler, Brant, Hiakotoo, and McDonald for bloody rogues and murtherin' rascals all!" They were ever like this, these two great overgrown boys, already celebrated so terribly in song and legend.

And the rank and file of Morgan's resembled them--brave to a fault, innately lawless, of scant education save what the forest had taught them, headstrong, quick to anger, quick to forgive, violent in every emotion through the entire gamut from love to hatred.
Boyd rose, glanced quietly at me, then made his signal.