Beadle's Dime Novels No. 96: Little Moccasin — page 93: what you’re looking at

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

s | | THE DEATH-GRAPPLE,. | _ 95 of a silyer-mounted sheath-knife, at which his foe was: tugging with his left hand, while pressing Gage’s face into the snow with his right. | Desperate and furious with a sense of mortal anguish and horror—for the scarlet fringe and the sumptuous leggings had revealed the Mohawk chief to. him, as by a flash of light- ning, so that he no longer needed to look up—poor Gage breathed one word of th to the God of his fathers, and then, like the giant of old, when he heaved at the pillars of | the temple, and tore it down, together with all the lords of the Philistines, upon his own head, he gathered himself for one last convulsive effort, and was preparing for the final issue of life or death—for one. or both—when a shot was heard afar off, in a different direction from the first, followed instantly by another—and then, there was a loud scream, like that of a young panther, so near and so startling, that he felt the grasp of the Mohawk chief relaxing, and the pressure of his knee lightening. Whereupon, thrusting both hands behind him, and throwing his arms round his adversary’s legs, and heaving with all his might, for life or death, he tumbled him backward, and instantly changing his position, like the adroit ‘wrestler i threw himself upon him like a panther. | Not a word had been spoken, not a cry uttered—nothing heard but the sound of a death-grapple, with an occasional gasp of agony. But the dread issue was far from being de- termined. Weaponless himself, Gage saw with unspeakable dismay that the tremendous savage, Who had been tugging so long with his left hand at his knife, had now disengaged it from the sheath in falling backward, and held it clutched in that same left hand, with remorseles energy, and lifted just ready to strike. Gage caught him by his wrist with his right, which had the grip of a blacksmith’s vice; but in the short, Saree strug- gle that instantly followed, received two or three blows that seemed to go through and through him—and then cries were heard approaching from different quarters, and then there eg : ty passed before him the flitting shadow of a woman; and be- fore he had time to look up or speak, he felt the handle of his own familiar hunting-knife in his conyulsive gripe, the . Connicioooksscomn