When these arrangements were completed, Ishmael approached the seemingly unconscious Esther, and announced his intention to inter the dead.

She heard him, and quietly relinquished her grasp of the corpse, rising in silence to follow it to its narrow resting place.

Here she seated herself again at the head of the grave, watching each movement of the youths with eager and jealous eyes.

When a sufficiency of earth was laid upon the senseless clay of Asa, to protect it from injury, Enoch and Abner entered the cavity, and trode it into a solid mass, by the weight of their huge frames, with an appearance of a strange, not to say savage, mixture of care and indifference.

This well-known precaution was adopted to prevent the speedy exhumation of the body by some of the carnivorous beasts of the prairie, whose instinct was sure to guide them to the spot.