THE RESCUE AT THE STAKE The word uttered by the strange woman was one to conjure with even then in the Illinois country.

Many a year had passed since the French flag ruled those prairies, yet not a warrior there but knew how the men of that race avenged an injury,--how swift their stroke, how keen their steel.
I watched the startled throng press closely backward, as if awed by her mysterious presence, influenced insensibly by her terse sentence of command, each dusky face a reflex of its owner's perplexity.

Drunken as most of them were, crazed with savage blood-lust and hours of remorseless torture of their victims, for the moment that sweet vision of womanly purity held them motionless, as if indeed the figure of the Christ she uplifted before their faces had taught them abhorrence of their crimes.
But it was not for long.

To hundreds of those present she was merely an unknown white woman; while even to those who knew her best, the Pottawattomies, she appeared only as one who came to balk them of their revenge.

They may have held her person inviolate amid their lodges, and even have countenanced her strange teaching; but now she had ventured too far in attempting thus to stand between them and their victim.