Chapter 13

A pickaxe, and a spade, a spade,
For,--and a shrouding sheet:
O, a pit of clay for to be made
For such a guest is meet.
--Song in Hamlet.

"Stand back! stand off, the whole of ye!" said Esther hoarsely to the
crowd, which pressed too closely on the corpse; "I am his mother, and
my right is better than that of ye all! Who has done this? Tell me,
Ishmael, Abiram, Abner! open your mouths and your hearts, and let
God's truth and no other issue from them. Who has done this bloody
deed?"

Her husband made no reply, but stood, leaning on his rifle, looking
sadly, but with an unaltered eye, at the mangled remains of his son.
Not so the mother, she threw herself on the earth, and receiving the
cold and ghastly head into her lap, she sat contemplating those
muscular features, on which the death-agony was still horridly
impressed, in a silence far more expressive than any language of
lamentation could have proved.

The voice of the woman was frozen in grief. In vain Ishmael attempted
a few words of rude consolation; she neither listened nor answered.
Her sons gathered about her in a circle, and expressed, after their
uncouth manner, their sympathy in her sorrow, as well as their sense
of their own loss, but she motioned them away, impatiently with her
hand. At times her fingers played in the matted hair of the dead, and
at others they lightly attempted to smooth the painfully expressive
muscles of its ghastly visage, as the hand of the mother is seen
lingering fondly about the features of her sleeping child. Then
starting from their revolting office, her hands would flutter around
her, and seem to seek some fruitless remedy against the violent blow,
which had thus suddenly destroyed the child in whom she had not only
placed her greatest hopes, but so much of her maternal pride. While
engaged in the latter incomprehensible manner, the lethargic Abner
turned aside, and swallowing the unwonted emotions which were rising
in his own throat, he observed--

"Mother means that we should look for the signs, that we may know in
what manner Asa has come by his end."

"We owe it to the accursed Siouxes!" answered Ishmael: "twice have
they put me deeply in their debt! The third time, the score shall be
cleared!"

But, not content with this plausible explanation, and, perhaps,
secretly glad to avert their eyes from a spectacle which awakened so
extraordinary and unusual sensations in their sluggish bosoms, the
sons of the squatter turned away in a body from their mother and the
corpse, and proceeded to make the enquiries which they fancied the
former had so repeatedly demanded. Ishmael made no objections; but,
though he accompanied