“Come on, then; they’re all waiting,” Dirk urged her. “I have to skulk up to the gym door and open it as quiet! Bring my captive in on the sly, see? They’ll all yell like sixty when they see us, so be ready.” They did yell like sixty! Beth thought they yelled like ten times sixty. In spite of her preparation for the onslaught she shrank back as the horrid din smote her. Then she fulfilled her promise to play the best she could and resumed her haughty bearing, the scornful, unmoved pride of a noble white lady in the hands of savages, whose only weapon against them was her contempt for the worst that they could do. No one could distinguish friendly Indians from the foes of her captor, for they were all in war paint and feathers, all brandishing tomahawks and yelling insanely, and they all fell on one another in a khaki-colored snarl of contest. Gradually the snarl divided to Beth’s eyes and by degrees half fell back and allowed the other half, with Dirk at their head, dragging Beth by the wrists, to progress to the further end of the great room. “Say, don’t come along so easy; you ought to hold back,” Dirk whispered to her. “No, I ought not,” Beth retorted. “If I couldn’t get away and knew it, I’d come along quietly, to trick you. Hannah Dustin kept still till she got her chance, then she killed the Indians and escaped. That’s exactly the way I’m acting my part.” Dirk was silenced. When Beth came down on him with an historical fact he wilted--and Beth had an inconvenient number of historical facts at her tongue’s end. When Dirk, as chief, deposited his captive on a chair at the extreme end of the gymnasium, called, for convenience, his wigwam, he went on the war path again, and this time the fight was unimpeded by a captive and was waged thoroughly. Though she knew that Mr. Leonard would not let the boys get carried away by the game, Beth’s heart beat hard with excitement. After a while Beth saw that the fight followed rules and that Dirk’s side was, on the whole, getting the best of it. Certain strokes counted as wounds, others were reckoned fatal and on receiving these the brave thus hit dropped out and was dragged aside. It was more interesting than Beth had expected to find it, though as little like a Twelfth Night revel as it well could be. When Dirk’s side was reduced to three spirited braves, yelling defiance to foes now outnumbering them by more than twice their number, Dirk turned to his tribe, crying: “Shall we fight till we kill them all? The palefaces will say the red man never shows mercy. Let’s capture them and torture them and make them work for us, but let them keep their scalps. Saying this the Big Chief Ride-on-the-Wind sprang to the top of the highest pine tree to overlook the field of battle.” With which speech, modeled on his best Indian stories, Dirk made a standing jump and rapidly swung himself to the top of the highest trapeze in the gymnasium.