Fanny Kelly

SAD FATE OF LITTLE MARY.

The reader will please go back with me to that fearful first night of my captivity, and to the moment when I put into execution the plan for dear little Mary’s escape, which I prayed might result in her restoration to our friends.

It must have been something more than a vague hope of liberty to be lost or won that guided the feeble steps of the child back on the trail to a bluff overlooking the road where, weary from the fatigue and terror of a night passed alone on the prairie, she sat, anxious, but hopeful, awaiting the coming of friends.

Rescue was seemingly near, now that she had reached the great road, and she knew that there would be a passing train of emigrants ere long.

It was in this situation she was seen by some passing soldiers, holding out her little trembling hands with eager joy and hope, imploring them to save her.

It was a party of but three or four soldiers returning from Fort Laramie, where they had been to meet the paymaster. They had been pursued by Indians the day before; had also passed the scene of the destruction of our train; and believed the country swarming with Indians. Their apprehensions were, therefore, fully aroused, and, fearing the little figure upon the distant bluff might be a decoy to lead them into ambush, hesitated to approach. There was a large ravine between, and it is not strange that their imagination should people it with lurking savages. However, they were about crossing to the relief of the little girl, when a party of Indians came in sight, and they became convinced it was a decoy, and turned and fled.

They returned to Deer Creek Station, and related the circumstance. Mr. Kelly, arriving soon after, heard it, and his heart sank within him at the description of the child, for he thought he recognized in it the form of our little Mary.

He applied to the officer in command for a detail of soldiers to go with him to search for her, but all entreaty and argument were in vain.

The agony that poor child endured as the soldiers turned away, and the war-whoop of the savage rang upon her terrified soul, is known only to God. Instead of the rescue and friends which, in her trusting heart and innocent faith, she had expected to find, fierce Indians stood before her, stringing their bows to take her life, thus to win another trophy, marking the Indian murderer.

The whizzing arrows were sent into the body of the helpless child, and with the twang of the bow-strings, the delicate form of the heroic child lay stretched upon the ground, and the bright angel spirit went home to rest in the bosom of its Father.

On the morning of the 14th, two days after Mary was seen, Mr. Kelly succeeded in obtaining a squad of soldiers at the station, and went out to search for the child, and after a short march of eight miles, they discovered the mutilated remains of the murdered girl.

Mr. Kelly’s grief and anguish knew no bounds.

Three arrows had pierced the body, and the tomahawk and scalping-knife had done their work. When discovered, her body lay with its little hands outstretched as if she had received, while running, the fatal arrows.

Surely He who numbers the sparrows and feeds the ravens was not unmindful of her in that awful hour, but allowed the heavenly kingdom, to which her trembling soul was about to take its flight, to sweeten, with a glimpse of its beatific glory, the bitterness of death, even as the martyr Stephen, seeing the bliss above, could not be conscious of the torture below.

Extracting the arrows from the wounds, and dividing her dress among the soldiers, then tenderly wrapping her in a winding sheet, Mr. Kelly had the sad satisfaction of smoothing the earth on the unconscious breast that had ceased to suffer, and when this duty was performed, they left the little grave all alone, far from the happy home of her childhood, and the brothers, with whom she had played in her innocent joy.

Of all strange and terrible fates, no one who had seen her gentle face in its loving sweetness, the joy and comfort of our hearts, would have predicted such a barbarous fate for her. But it was only the passage from death into life, from darkness into daylight, from doubt and fear into endless love and joy. Those little ones, whose spirits float upward from their downy pillows, amid the tears and prayers of broken-hearted friends, are blest to enter in at heaven’s shining gate, which lies as near little Mary’s rocky, blood-stained pillow in the desolate waste as the palace of a king, and when she had once gained the great and unspeakable bliss of heaven, it must have blotted out the remembrance of the pain that won it, and made no price too great for such delight.