Beadle's Dime Novels No. 96: Little Moccasin — page 92: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

94. LITTLE MOCCASIN - Fletcher lay motionless and silent in bf§ lair, waiting for the signal. But no signal was heard. Another minute passed— another-—it seemed very long, and then came a sharp, dis- tant rifle-crack, so far off as to astonish them. . Their path was now clear, and away both sprung, like | sleuth-hounds upon the trail. The beautiful captive threw up her pinioned arms, and rose to her feet ; Gage saw her, and instantly forgetting the whole plan of operations, turned back, whipped out his long hunting-knife, and telling the poor girl not to be frightened, sprung to her help, leaving his rifle, where it stood, leaning against a’ tree. Instead of screaming or crouching, or trying to hide herself—instead of being para- lyzed with terror, when she saw the apparition of a stranger bursting from the deep shadow with flaming eyes, and brand- ishing a knife, as he rushed upon her, the brave girl threw back her head with the air of a princess having armed at- tendants within call, and fastened her flashing eyes upon him; and then, as if satisfied with what she saw at a single elance— moved toward him, and held out jer pinioned arms with a look he will never forget to his dying day. One flash of that sharp, glittering knife, and she was free! And the next moment, before he had time to speak, she had vanished ; and then, God help the poor fellow! there was a tiger-spring, and he ‘founds himself completely overborne> and pressed to the earth by ind i huge and colossal that came © out of the darkness behind him. In the first shock and sur- prise and terror of the moment, the hunting-knife flew from his hand into the bushes far beyond his reach—the rifle, too, was a long way off—and there he lay struggling and prostrate, and gasping for breath—weaponless and helpless—with his - forehead forced down into the wet snow, and.one knee of his powerful adversary planted just between his shoulders with a pressure so enormous and so irresistible, that he remembered nothing like it in all his past experience. He tried to lift his head—to turn it——-to look up into the face of the awful mys- tery that was trying to throttle him, or, perhaps, to smother him outright in the half-melted snow and.ashes. But all in Pain; though, in the struggle, he caught a glimpse of richly- “embroidered leggings, and a heavy scarlet fringe along the borders of a fur robe; and,.at last, of something like the hilt a Comicbooksicom