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And the gaunt old Indian Cattle Thief dropped
    dead on the open plain.
And that band of cursing settlers gave one
    triumphant yell,
And rushed like a pack of demons on the body that
    writhed and fell.
"Cut the fiend up into inches, throw his carcass
    on the plain;
Let the wolves eat the cursed Indian, he'd have
    treated us the same."
A dozen hands responded, a dozen knives gleamed
    high,
But the first stroke was arrested by a woman's
    strange, wild cry.
And out into the open, with a courage past
    belief,
She dashed, and spread her blanket o'er the corpse
    of the Cattle Thief;
And the words outleapt from her shrunken lips in
    the language of the Cree,
"If you mean to touch that body, you must cut
    your way through me."
And that band of cursing settlers dropped
    backward one by one,
For they knew that an Indian woman roused, was
    a woman to let alone.
And then she raved in a frenzy that they scarcely
    understood,
Raved of the wrongs she had suffered since her
    earliest babyhood:
"Stand back, stand back, you white-skins, touch
    that dead man to your shame;