I knew that pain
was coming; but I was already in pain, and the sick man does not
trouble himself about degrees of suffering. Death, too, was coming; but
for that I had been long ready. The hardest thing that man can do is to
endure, but this was to me no passive endurance; it was an active
struggle to show a fortitude worthy of the gallant dead.
So I must suppose that I hung there in my bonds with a motionless face
and a mouth which gave out no cry. They brought the faggots, and poured
on water, and I did not look their way. Some score of braves began a
war dance, circling round me, waving their tomahawks, and singing their
wild chants. For me they did not break the moonlit silence, I was
hearing other sounds and seeing far other sights. An old sad song of
Ringan's was in my ears, something about an exile who cried out in
France for the red heather and the salt winds of the Isles.
"_Nevermore the deep fern_," it ran, "_or the bell of the dun deer, far
my castle is wind-blown sands, and my homelands are a stranger's."_
And the air brought back in a flash my own little house on the grey
hill-sides of Douglasdale, the cluck of hens about the doors on a hot
summer morn, the crying of plovers in the windy Aprils, the smell of
peatsmoke when the snow drifted over Cairntable.
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