And so, Pendleton’s palsied hand tittered and flapped against his coattail with involuntary excitement and Hempstead, with long practice, pressed a big hand to the wretched limb, which he had trained to curl behind for formal affairs and slip into the breast of his coat in the lee of casual time. The spectacle before him appealed immensely to the ghost of his long lost child-self, which still floundered obstinately within his slight breast.

Both of the savages were tall and stripped to the waist, their muscular bodies marked with old wounds. The Susquehanna Chief, Moon Dog, was just over six feet and superbly formed, his coppery skin smoothly revealing the lines of a man muscled for war and other manly things that Pendleton’s infirmity had withheld from him. His head had been plucked bald except for a long, braided topknot, formed into a platted ball on the crown, stuck trough with porcupine quills, decorated with a number of red beads and accented with a single black eagle feather. Moon Dog was a magnificent picture of manhood and his eyes glowered with an intensity of purpose that Pendleton could only dream of.

To his back stood his eight men, all tall, strong and coifed in this same barbaric fashion, which Pendleton understood, from his intense reading, represented an effort to vest one’s warrior aspect in a readymade trophy at the top of one’s head with which to tempt the enemy in this rudely wild form of reciprocal strife that so dominated heathen life on these tree-shrouded shores. The warriors that backed him all wore steel trade knives and stone tomahawks in their tanned, skin loincloths and had bows and arrow bundles hung over their shoulders. The forests were so dense in this land that warriors carried five or six arrows each, and quickly loosing these among the enemy, took to their cleaving and chopping weapons, the knife reserved for trophy taking for the most part.

The frightful war-making spirit of these peoples were vested primarily in their great war clubs. Each warrior had one personalized to fit his hand and they were all held over the shoulder or propped on a foot by the supporting warriors. Moon Dog’s club was made from the stock of a musket, carved to resemble a stalking panther. Where the barrel of the musket would be was imbedded the foible and point of a Spanish rapier. Where the matchlock had been mounted, protruded the blade of an English trade knife, rounding out the functional aspects of the tool. But, such savage weapons were at once tools and talismans to the people who wielded them, and this club was no exception, for the teeth of presumably dead men were imbedded all along the sweep of the wooden shoulder stock—having become something of an ax head—even as three scalps hung from the slot where the trigger of the civilized weapon had been housed.

Across the plaza by twenty paces stood Hush, chief of the Devil Dogs, who apparently named themselves after some hellcat of a squaw, even though this beat-up fellow was nearly the spitting image of Jay Bracken, obviously a son. That such a folk, renowned as the fiercest men in a savage land, would identify their lineage through a woman, was puzzling. The fellow had a broken jaw, broken nose, teeth terribly splintered in the right side of his mouth and was covered with wounds that seemed to mark a cat-wrestling mishap and a broadsword duel. He appeared no more intelligent than the rather dull Bracken, but possessed a fire—an unquenched sense of agitated purpose, beyond his own control—that the languidly homicidal father had not demonstrated.

Hush was an clean six feet tall, making him a giant next to Pendleton, but unremarkable in stature compared to the Susquehanna, none of whom were as large as Hempstead. His musculature, however, was beastly, inhuman, as had been his father’s. There was also the curiously bald head, without a hair growing from it at perhaps the age of 30, apparently a familial trait. Contrasting with the unnatural baldness, was the thick body hair, twice as prominent as the Florentine footman he had employed in Romanga. Most unsettling was that this man seemed to be almost entirely of White, Christian make, with barely a hint of the wider Indian head and with skin as pale and freckled as some Irish servant too long in the barley field. The man was armed with an awesome, oversized sword, a highland claymore from another age, the very same weapon—and Pendleton, Hempstead and Griegs were all entirely certain of this—which they had seen the Scotch maroon use to butcher Don Enrique and the priests those many years ago.

With a shiver of steel the blade emerged from the wooden scabbard, which was tossed aside and the two savages shrieked to the sky with wild eyes, the battle cry of the Devil Dog chief failing in a gurgle. The two then glared inhumanly at each other. Moon Dog then spoke and Pendleton nudged Rawlings for a translation, as the harangue was in their savage tongue:

“Come to drink my soul with the devil knife! I will drink your blood, and do evil to your puddle-dwelling people and so on and such like.”

To this, something unsettling occurred, the Devil Dog chief squatted forward menacingly with a slathering snarl that barred a fine set of healthy teeth on one side of the mouth and splintered ruin on the other, the hackle hair on the muscle-lumped back of his shoulders below the neck springing up like that of a bristling boar. This bothered all and Moon Dog snarled something, to which Rawlings sloppily related, “Your father was the Devil’s son, your mother more the whore than the other whore-squaws of your devil-buggering kind.”

With that Moon Dog advanced slightly away from his men with what seemed the intend of drawing an attack, to which the Devil Dog chief took a great leap—that should not have been possible—clearing half of the twenty paces without taking a step. The people all about gasped at this, but Moon Dog showed no fear, simply hissing like a great cat, inviting the death leap that would bring his enemy plummeting upon him with the great sword singing down from on high. With a chill, Pendleton did recall, that there had been something unnaturally vital about the father, who had swum that icy river to complete the capture of a horseman who he had rundown over the course of a snow-choked day while nearly naked.

The Devil Dog chief landed in a cat-crouch in the snowy powder that dressed the cold, hard ground and then leaped again, off of one leg, launching himself like a catapulted stone, with whistling blade in hand, at Moon Dog, who, with a cheer for his prowess from all—and a whoop from his warriors—bounded impressively himself, far out to the side and somewhat behind, on an angle that brought him safely clear of that arcing five feet of ripping steel. As Moon Dog landed halfway to Pendleton’s balustrade with a grunt of triumph and his men smiled in admiration, the devil was upon them. That great leap had brought him further by a pace than where Moon Dog had crouched at bay with his back to his warriors, and as the beastly, white savage came to earth so did that blade, from east to west, from Heaven to Hell—ripping through the skull of one man, cleaving in twain the torso of another and taking off the foot of a third. With a sickening, collective wail of pain, three men went down. And with a gurgling roar the blade rose with its pivoting wielder and ripped upward, from Hell to Heaven, from east to west, up through a sickeningly separating shin, through a beautifully formed abdomen—shearing from above the hip to just below the rib—and then leveling out as the bone-cleaving “shing” of the blade caught the air and red drops colored the falling snow—ripping through two more torsos, even as the hands of the owners raised their war clubs to take up the battle that would never by fought. The last of Moon Dog’s men backed away in three little hops as he brought his bow into play and knocked an arrow, only to have his hand, bow-stave, bow-string and neck all separate before the singing steel.

As the last of the Susquehanna warriors fell away into the falling snow to spatter the fallen snow with his life blood, Moon Dog let go a terrible howl—the sound of which would haunt Pendleton in his dreams until he breathed his last—and leaped at the Devil Dog chief, who leaped likewise, the both of them coming together in the snow-flecked air with a slithering thud as the point of the great sword sang through the bowels of the last man of his tribe and the mortal enemies fell to ground in the midst of the ghastly welter of dead and dying savages.

The blood-smeared form of the hairy, white Indian, rose up from the body of he who he had done to death most dastardly, let out a horrific gurgling scream and then pinned the poor wretch to the hard earth with the downward thrust of a sword that should not have sung its song in this godless land, nor in this God-fearing time.

Pendleton, though, kept his composure, and asked of Hempstead, “Do counsel your willow burden, Hempstead, as my Indian allies all now lay dead, should I have this dastard fellow shot through for this vile deed, or engage him to shew us the way to the Spanish hoard?”

Hempstead’s large voice ground in his throat, “I liked his father not and he less. Be it so that a plantation needs its savage guardians. Nor would the raised eyebrow of Lord Protector Cromwell himself keep your dreamy foot from the treasure trace. As such, I see you have no choice.”

Rawlings was more optimistic, “That bear-bugger will do in a fight with savages—en your person shall be safeguarded. My men will be ever keen to put a ball of lead through his painted head.”

Rawlings’ tone bespoke a man who had already committed to the treasure quest suggested by this savage just before he had done in his rivals.

Pendleton, of a sudden felt himself coming into his own, having viewed this most hideous butchery without flinching or cheering, adjudged himself worthy to take on a testy savage as a pet ally, for the health of The Plantation, the Glory of The Lord, the approval of his betters and to finally plug that leaking, worm-eaten plank in the hull of his lonely soul, “Indeed, mine counselors, cautionary engagement shall be the agreed upon course.”