A deep gully, washed in the side of the hill by the rains, was here found running obliquely from its top to the bottom, affording a covered way, by which, as they saw at a glance, they could approach within twenty or thirty yards of the foe entirely unseen; and, to add to its advantages, it was the bed of a little water-course, whose murmurs, as it leaped from rock to rock, assured them they could as certainly approach unheard.
"Truly," muttered Nathan, with a grim chuckle, as he looked, first, at the friendly ravine, and then at the savages below, "the Philistine rascals is in our hands, and we will smite them hip and thigh!" With this inspiring assurance he crept into the ravine; and Roland following, they were soon in possession of a post commanding, not only the spot occupied by the enemy, but the whole valley.
Peeping through the fringe of shrubs that rose, a verdant parapet, on the brink of the gully, they looked down upon the savage party, now less than forty paces from the muzzle of their guns, and wholly unaware of the fate preparing for them.

The scene of diversion and torment was over; the prisoner, a man of powerful frame but squallid appearance, whose hat,--a thing of shreds and patches,--adorned the shorn pate of one of the Indians, while his coat, equally rusty and tattered, hung from the shoulders of a second, lay bound under a tree, but so nigh that they could mark the laborious heavings of his chest.

Two of the Indians sat near him on the grass keeping watch, their hatchets in their hands, their guns resting within reach against the trunk of a tree overthrown by some hurricane of former years, and now mouldering away.

A third was engaged with his tomahawk, lopping away the few dry boughs that remained on the trunk.

Squatting at the fire, which the third was thus labouring to replenish with fuel, were the two remaining savages, who, holding their rifles in their hands, divided their attention betwixt a shoulder of venison roasting on a stick in the fire, and the captive, whom they seemed to regard as destined to be sooner or later disposed of in a similar manner.
The position of the parties precluded the hope Nathan had ventured to entertain of getting them in a cluster, and so doing double execution with each bullet; but the disappointment neither chilled his ardour nor embarrassed his plans.