The
young men showed an impatience to begin to torture that Rivenoak
understood, and, as his older associates manifested no disposition
to permit any longer delay, he was compelled to give the signal
for the infernal work to proceed.
Chapter XXIX.
"The ugly bear now minded not the stake,
Nor how the cruel mastiffs do him tear,
The stag lay still unroused from the brake,
The foamy boar feared not the hunter's spear:
All thing was still in desert, bush, and briar:"
Thomas Sackville; "The Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham,"
lxxxi.
Twas one of the common expedients of the savages, on such occasions,
to put the nerves of their victims to the severest proofs. On the
other hand, it was a matter of Indian pride to betray no yielding
to terror, or pain, but for the prisoner to provoke his enemies
to such acts of violence as would soonest produce death. Many a
warrior had been known to bring his own sufferings to a more speedy
termination, by taunting reproaches and reviling language, when he
found that his physical system was giving way under the agony of
sufferings produced by a hellish ingenuity that might well eclipse
all that has been said of the infernal devices of religious
persecution.
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