Then a faint sense of its familiarity pushed up through many old memories.
Sometime, somewhere, he had known the face.
The dying man opened his eyes wide, not seeing, but convulsively, and then he felt himself enlightened by something in their dark colour,--something in the line of the brow under the black hair;--a face was brought back to him, the handsome face of the jaunty militia captain at Nauvoo, the man who had helped expel his people, who had patronised them with his airs of protector,--the man who had-- It did not come to him until that instant--this man was Girnway.

In the flash of awful comprehension he dropped, a sickened and nerveless heap, beside the dead man, turning his head on the ground, and feeling for any sign of life at his heart.
Forward there, where the yells of the Indians had all but replaced the screams of frantic women--butchered already perhaps, subjected to he knew not what infamy at the hands of savage or Saint--was the yellow-haired, pink-faced girl he had loved and kept so long imaged in his heart; yet she might have escaped, she might still live--she might even not have been in the party.
He sprang up and found himself facing a white-haired boy, who held a little crying girl by a tight grasp of her arm, and who eyed him aggressively.
"What did you hurt Prudence's father for?
He was a good man.

Did you shoot him ?" He seized the boy roughly by the shoulder.
"Prudence--Prudence--where is she ?" "Here." He looked down at the little girl, who still cried.

Even in that glance he saw her mother's prettiness, her pink and white daintiness, and the yellow shine of her hair.
"Her mother, then,--quick!" The boy pointed ahead.
"Up there--she told me to take care of Prudence, and when the Indians came out she made me run back here to look for him." He pointed to the still figure on the ground before them.

And then, making a brave effort to keep back the tears: "If I had a gun I'd shoot some Indians;--I'd shoot you, too--you killed him.