University of Virginia Library

9. CHAPTER IX.

When within twenty feet of the prisoners, the
Tetons stopped, and their leader made a sign to the
old man to draw nigh. The trapper obeyed, quitting
the young Pawnee with a significant look, which was
received, as it was meant, for an additional pledge
that he would never forget his promise. So soon as
Mahtoree found that the other had stopped within
reach of him, he stretched forth his arm, and laying
a hand upon the shoulder of the attentive old man,
he stood regarding him, a minute, with eyes that
seemed willing to penetrate the recesses of his most
secret thoughts.

“Is a Pale-face made with two tongues?” he demanded,
when he found that, as usual, with the subject
of this examination, he was as little intimidated
by his present frown as moved by any apprehensions
of the future.

“Honesty lies deeper than the skin.”

“It is so. Now let my father hear me. Mahtoree
has but one tongue, the grey-head has many. They
may be all straight, and none of them forked. A
Sioux is no more than a Sioux, but a Pale-face is
every thing! He can talk to the Pawnee, and the
Konza, and the Omawhaw, and he can talk to his
own people.”

“Ay, there are linguisters in the settlements that
can do still more. But what profits it all? The Master
of Life has an ear for every language!”

“The grey-head has done wrong. He has said one

thing when he meant another. He has looked before
him with his eyes, and behind him with his mind.
He has ridden the horse of a Sioux too hard; he has
been the friend of a Pawnee and the enemy of my
people.”

“Teton, I am your prisoner. Though my words
are white, they will not complain. Act your will.”

“No. Mahtoree will not make a white hair red.
My father is free. The prairie is open on every side
of him. But before the gray-head turns his back on
the Siouxes, let him look well at them, that he may
tell his own chief, how great is a Dahcotah!”

“I am not in a hurry to go on my path. You see
a man with a white head, and no woman, Teton;
therefore shall I not run myself out of breath, to tell
the nations of the prairies what the Siouxes are
doing.”

“It is good. My father has smoked with the chiefs
at many councils,” returned Mahtoree, who now
thought himself sufficiently sure of the other's favour
to go more directly to his object. “Mahtoree will
speak with the tongue, of his very dear friend and
father. A young Pale-face will listen when an old
man of that nation opens his mouth. Go, my father
will make what a poor Indian says fit for a white
ear.”

“Speak aloud!” said the trapper, who readily understood
the metaphorical manner, in which the Teton
expressed a desire that he should become an interpreter
of his words into the English language;
“speak, my young men listen. Now, captain, and
you too, friend bee-hunter, prepare yourselves to
meet the deviltries of this savage with the stout
hearts of white warriors. If you find yourselves giving
way under his threats, just turn your eyes on that
noble looking Pawnee, whose time is measured with
a hand as niggardly, as that with which a trader in
the towns gives forth the fruits of the Lord, inch by

inch, in order to satisfy his covetousness. A single
look at the boy will set you both up in resolution.”

“My brother has turned his eyes on the wrong
path;” interrupted Mahtoree, with a complacency
that betrayed how unwilling he was to offend his intended
interpreter.

“The Dahcotah will speak to my young men?”

“After he has sung in the ear of the flower of the
Pale-faces.”

“The Lord forgive the desperate villian!” exclaimed
the old man in English. “There are none so tender,
or so young, or so innocent, as to escape his ravenous
wishes. But hard words and cold looks will
profit nothing; therefore it will be wise to speak him
fair. Let Mahtoree open his mouth.”

“Would my father cry out, that the women and
children should hear the wisdom of chiefs. We will
go into the lodge and whisper.”

As the Teton ended, he pointed significantly towards
a tent, vividly emblazoned with the history of
one of his own boldest and most commended exploits,
and which stood a little apart from the rest, as
if to denote it was the residence of some privileged
individual of the band. The shield and quiver at its
entrance were richer than common, and the high distinction
of a fusee, unequivocally attested the importance
of its proprietor. In every other particular it
was rather distinguished by signs of poverty than of
wealth. The domestic utensils were fewer in number
and simpler in their forms, than those to be
seen about the openings of the meanest lodges, nor
was there a single one of those high-prized articles
of civilized life, which were occasionally bought of
the traders, in bargains that bore so hard on the ignorant
natives. All these had been bestowed, as they
had been acquired, by the generous chief, on his subordinates,
to purchase an influence that might render
him the master of their lives and persons; a species

of wealth that was certainly more noble in itself, and
far dearer to his ambition.

The old man well knew this to be the lodge of
Mahtoree, and, in obedience to the sign of the chief,
he held his way towards it with slow and reluctant
steps. But there were others present, who were
equally interested in the approaching conference,
whose apprehensions were not to be so easily suppressed.
The watchful eyes and jealous ears of Middleton
had taught him enough to fill his soul with the
most horrible forebodings. With an incredible effort
he succeeded in gaining his feet, and called aloud to
the retiring trapper—

“I conjure you, old man, if the love you bore my
parents was more than words, or if the love you bear
your God is that of a Christian man, utter not a
syllable that may wound the ear of that innocent—”

Exhausted in spirit and fettered in limbs, he then
fell, like an inanimate log, to the earth, where he lay
as if perfectly dead.

Paul had however caught the clue and completed
the exhortation, in his peculiar manner.

“Harkee, old trapper,” he shouted, vainly endeavouring
at the same time to make a gesture of defiance
with his hand; “if you ar' about to play the interpreter,
speak such words to the ears of that damnable
savage, as becomes a white man to use and a heathen
to hearken to. Tell him, from me, that if he does
or says the thing that is uncivil to the girl, called
Nelly Wade, that I'll curse him with my dying breath;
that I'll pray for all good Christians in Kentucky to
curse him; sitting and standing; eating and drinking;
fighting, praying, or at horse-races; in-doors and out-doors;
in summer or winter, or in the month of March;
in short I'll—ay, it ar' a fact, morally true—I'll haunt
him, if the ghost of a Pale-face can contrive to lift
itself from a grave made by the hands of a Red-skin!”

Having thus vented the most terrible denunciation
he could devise, and the one which, in the eyes of
the honest bee-hunter, there seemed the greatest
likelihood of his being able to put in execution, he
was obliged to await the fruits of his threat, with all
that calm resignation which would be apt to govern
a western border-man who, in addition to the prospects
just named, had the advantage of contemplating
them in fetters and bondage. We shall not detain
the narrative, to relate the quaint morals with which
he next endeavoured to cheer the drooping spirits of
his more sensitive companion, or the occasional pithy
and peculiar benedictions that he pronounced, on all
the bands of the Dahcotahs, commencing with those
whom he accused of stealing or murdering, on the
banks of the distant Mississippi, and concluding, in
terms of suitable energy, with the Teton tribe. The
latter more than once received from his lips curses
as sententious and as complicated as that celebrated
anathema of the church, for a knowledge of which
most unlettered Protestants are indebted to the pious
researches of the worthy Tristram Shandy. But as
Middleton recovered from his exhaustion he was fain
to appease the boisterous temper of his associate, by
admonishing him of the uselessness of such denunciations,
and of the possibility of their hastening the
very evil he deprecated, by irritating the resentments
of a race, who were sufficiently fierce and lawless,
even in their most pacific moods.

In the mean time the trapper and the Sioux chief
had pursued their way to the lodge. The former
had watched with painful interest the expression of
Mahtoree's eye, while the words of Middleton and
Paul were pursuing their foot-steps, but the mien of
the Indian was far too much restrained and self-guarded,
to permit the smallest of his emotions to
escape through any of those ordinary outlets, by
which the condition of the human volcano is commonly

betrayed. His look was fastened on the little
tenement they approached; and, for the moment, his
thoughts appeared to brood alone on the purposes of
this extraordinary visit.

The appearance of the interior of the lodge corresponded
with its exterior. It was larger than most
of the others, more finished in its form, and finer in
its materials; but there its superiority ceased. Nothing
could be more simple and republican than the
form of living that the ambitious and powerful Teton
chose to exhibit to the eyes of his people. A choice
collection of weapons for the chase, some three or
four medals, bestowed by the traders and political
agents of the Canadas as a homage to, or rather as
an acknowledgment of his rank, with a few of the
most indispensable articles of personal accommodation,
composed its furniture. It abounded in neither
venison nor the wild-beef of the prairies; its crafty
owner having well understood that the liberality of a
single individual would be abundantly rewarded by
the daily contributions of a band. Although as preeminent
in the chase as in war, a deer or a buffaloe
was never seen to enter whole into his lodge. In return
an animal was rarely brought into the encampment,
that did not contribute to support the family
of Mahtoree. But the policy of the chief seldom
permitted more to remain than sufficed for the wants
of the day, perfectly assured that all must suffer before
hunger, the bane of savage life, could lay its fell
fangs on so important a victim.

Immediately beneath the favourite bow of the
chief, and encircled in a sort of magical ring of
spears, shields, lances and arrows, all of which had
in their time done good service, was suspended the
mysterious and sacred medicine-bag. It was highly
wrought in wampum, and profusely ornamented with
beads and porcupine's quills, after the most cunning
devices of Indian ingenuity. The peculiar freedom

of Mahtoree's religious creed has been more than
once intimated, and by a singular species of contradiction,
he appeared to have lavished his attentions
on this emblem of a supernatural agency, in a degree
that was precisely inverse to his faith. It was merely
the manner, in which the Sioux imitated the well-known
expedient of the Pharisees, “in order that
they might be seen of men.”

The tent had not, however, been entered by its
owner since his return from the recent expedition.
As the reader has already anticipated it had been
made the prison of Inez and Ellen. The bride of
Middleton was seated on a simple couch of sweetscented
herbs covered with skins. She had already
suffered so much, and witnessed so many wild and
unlooked-for events within the short space of her
captivity, that every additional misfortune fell with a
diminished force on her seemingly devoted head.
Her cheeks were bloodless, her dark and usually animated
eye was contracted in an expression of settled
concern, and her form appeared shrinking and sensitive,
nearly to extinction. But in the midst of these
evidences of natural weakness, there were at times
such an air of pious resignation, such gleams of meek
but holy hope lighting her countenance, as might well
have rendered it a question whether the hapless captive
was most a subject of pity or of admiration.
All the precepts of father Ignatius were riveted in
her faithful memory, and not a few of his pious visions
were floating before her heated imagination.
Sustained by such sacred resolutions the mild, the
patient and the confiding girl was bowing her head to
this new stroke of Providence, with the same sort of
meekness as she would have submitted to any other
prescribed penitence for her sins, though nature, at
moments, warred powerfully, with so compelled a
humility.

On the other hand, Ellen had exhibited far more

of the woman, and consequently of the passions of
the world. She had wept until her eyes were swollen
and red. Her cheeks were flushed and angry
and her whole mien was distinguished by an air of
spirit and resentment, that was not a little, however,
qualified by apprehensions for the future. In short,
there was that about the eye and step of the betrothed
of Paul, which gave a warranty that should happier
times arrive, and the constancy of the bee-hunter
finally meet with its reward, he would possess a partner
every way worthy to cope with his own thoughtless
and buoyant temperament.

There was still another and a third figure in that
little knot of females. It was the youngest, the most
highly gifted, and, until now, the most favoured of
the wives of the Teton. Her charms had not been
without the most powerful attraction in the eyes of
her husband, until they had so unexpectedly opened
on the surpassing loveliness of a woman of the Pale-faces.
From that hapless moment the graces, the attachment,
the fidelity of the young Indian, had lost
their power to please. Still the complexion of Tachechana,
though less dazzling than that of her rival,
was, for her race, clear and healthy. Her hazel eye
had the sweetness and playfulness of the antelope's;
her voice was soft and joyous as the song of the wren,
and her happy laugh was the very melody of the
forest. Of all the Sioux girls, Tachechana (the
Fawn) was the lightest-hearted and the most envied.
Her father had been a distinguished brave, and her
brothers had already left their bones on a distant and
dreary war-path. Numberless were the warriors,
who had sent presents to the lodge of her parents,
but none of them were listened to until a messenger
from the great Mahtoree had come. She was his
third wife, it is true, but she was confessedly the most
favoured of them all. Their union had existed but
two short seasons, and its fruits now lay sleeping at

her feet, wrapped in the customary ligatures of skin
and bark, which form the swaddlings of an Indian
infant.

At the moment, when Mahtoree and the trapper
arrived at the opening of the lodge, the young Sioux
wife was seated on a simple stool, turning her soft
eyes, with looks that varied like her emotions with
love and wonder, from the unconscious child to those
rare beings, who had filled her youthful and uninstructed
mind with so much admiration and astonishment.
Though Inez and Ellen had passed an entire
day in her sight, it seemed as if the longings of her
curiosity were increasing with each new gaze. She
regarded them as beings of an entirely different nature
and condition from the females of the prairie.
Even the mystery of their complicated attire had its
secret influence on her simple mind, though it was
the grace and charms of sex, to which nature has
made every people so sensible, that most attracted
her admiration. But while her ingenuous disposition
freely admitted the superiority of the strangers over
the less brilliant attractions of the Dahcotah maidens,
she had seen no reason to deprecate their advantages.
The visit that she was now about to receive,
was the first which her husband had made to the tent
since his return from the recent inroad, and he was
ever present to her thoughts, as a successful warrior,
who was not ashamed, in the moments of inaction,
to admit the softer feelings of a father and a husband.

We have every where endeavoured to show that
while Mahtoree was in all essentials a warrior of the
prairies, he was much in advance of his people in
those acquirements which announce the dawnings of
civilization. He had held frequent communion with
the traders and troops of the Canadas, and the inter-course
had unsettled many of those wild opinions
which were his birth-right, without perhaps substituting

any others of a nature sufficiently definite to
be profitable. His reasoning was rather subtle than
true, and his philosophy far more audacious than
profound. Like thousands of more enlightened beings,
who fancy they are able to go through the trials
of human existence without any other support than
their own resolutions, his morals were accommodating
and his motives selfishness. These several characteristics
will be understood always with reference
to the situation of the Indian, though little apology
is needed for finding resemblances between men, who
essentially possess the same nature, however it may
be modified by circumstances.

Notwithstanding the presence of Inez and Ellen,
the entrance of the Teton warrior, into the lodge of
his favourite wife, was made with the tread and mien
of a master. The step of his moccasin was noiseless,
but the rattling of his bracelets, and of the silver
ornaments of his leggings, sufficed to announce his
approach as he pushed aside the skin covering of the
opening of the tent, and stood in the presence of its
inmates. A faint cry of pleasure burst from the lips
of Tachechana in the suddenness of her surprise,
but the emotion was instantly suppressed in that subdued
demeanour which should characterize a matron
of her tribe. Instead of returning the stolen glance
of his youthful and secretly rejoicing wife, Mahtoree
moved to the couch, occupied by his prisoners, and
placed himself in the haughty, upright attitude of an
Indian chief, before their eyes. The old man had
glided past him, and already taken a position suited
to the office he had been commanded to fill.

Surprise kept the females for a moment silent and
nearly breathless. Though accustomed to the sight
of savage warriors, in all the horrid panoply of their
terrible profession, there was something so startling
in the entrance, and so audacious in the inexplicable
look of their conqueror, that the eyes of both sunk

to the earth under a feeling of terror and perhaps
of embarrassment. Then Inez recovered herself,
and addressing the trapper she demanded, with the
dignity of an offended gentlewoman, though with her
accustomed grace of, to what circumstance they
owed this extraordinary and unexpected visit. The
old man hesitated; but clearing his throat, like one
who was about to make an effort to which he was
little used, he ventured on the following reply—

“Lady,” he said, “a savage is a savage, and you
are not to look for the uses and formalities of the
settlements on a bleak and windy prairie. As these
Indians would say, fashions and courtesies are things
so light, that they would blow away. As for myself,
though a man of the forest, I have seen the ways of
the great, in my time, and I am not to learn that they
differ from the ways of the lowly. I was long a serving-man
in my youth, not one of your beck-and-nod
runners about a household, but a man that went
through the servitude of the forest with his officer,
and well do I know in what manner to approach the
wife of a captain. Now, had I the ordering of this
visit, I would first have hemmed aloud at the door,
in order that you might hear that strangers were coming,
and then I—”

“The manner is indifferent,” interrupted Inez, too
anxious to await the prolix explanations of the old
man; “why is the visit made?”

“Therein shall the savage speak for himself.—The
daughters of the Pale-faces wish to know why the
Great Teton has come into his lodge?”

Mahtoree regarded his interrogator with a surprise,
which showed how extraordinary he deemed the
question. Then placing himself in a posture of condescension,
after a moment's delay, he answered—

“Sing in the ears of the dark-eye. Tell her the
lodge of Mahtoree is very large, and that it is not
full. She shall find room in it, and none shall be

greater than she. Tell the light-hair, that she too
may stay in the lodge of a brave, and eat of his venison.
Mahtoree is a great chief. His hand is never
shut.”

“Teton,” returned the trapper, shaking his head in
evidence of the strong disapprobation with which he
heard this language, “the tongue of a Red-skin must
be coloured white before it can make music in the ears
of a Pale-face. Should your words be spoken, my
daughters would shut their ears, and Mahtoree would
seem a trader to their eyes. Now listen to what
comes from a gray-head, and then speak accordingly.
My people is a mighty people. The sun rises on
their eastern and sets on their western border. The
land is filled with bright-eyed and laughing girls, like
these you see—ay, Teton I tell no lie,” observing his
auditor to start with an air of distrust—“bright-eyed
and pleasant to behold, as these before you.”

“Has my father a hundred wives?” interrupted
the savage, laying his finger on the shoulder of the
trapper, with a look of curious interest in the reply.

“No, Dahcotah. The Master of Life has said to
me, live alone; your lodge shall be the forest; the
roof of your wigwam, the clouds. But, though never
bound in the secret faith which, in my nation, ties
one man to one woman, often have I seen the workings
of that kindness which brings the two together.
Go into the regions of my people; you will see the
daughters of the land, fluttering through the towns
like many coloured and joyful birds in the season
of blossoms. You will meet them, singing and rejoicing,
along the great paths of the country, and you
will hear the woods ringing with their laughter. They
are very excellent to behold, and the young men find
pleasure in looking at them.”

“Hugh!” ejaculated the attentive Mahtoree.

“Ay, well may you put faith in what you hear, for
it is no lie. But when a youth has found a maiden

to please him, he speaks to her in a voice so soft,
that none else can hear. He does not say, my lodge
is empty and there is room for another; but shall
I build, and will the virgin show me near what
spring she would dwell? His voice is sweeter than
honey from the locust, and goes into the ear thrilling
like the song of a wren. Therefore, if my brother
wishes his words to be heard, he must speak with a
white tongue.”

Mahtoree pondered deeply, and in a wonder that
he did not attempt to conceal. It was reversing all
the order of society, and, according to his established
opinions, endangering the dignity of a chief, for a
warrior thus to humble himself before a woman. But
as Inez sat before him, reserved and imposing in air,
utterly unconscious of his object, and least of all suspecting
the true purport of so extraordinary a visit,
the savage felt the influence of a manner to which
he was unaccustomed. Bowing his head, as if in acknowledgment
of his error, he stepped a little back,
and placing himself in an attitude of easy dignity, he
began to speak with the confidence of one who had
been no less distinguished for his eloquence than for
his deeds in arms. Keeping his eyes riveted on the
unconscious bride of Middleton he proceeded in the
following words.

“I am a man with a red skin, but my eyes are dark.
They have been open since many snows. They have
seen many things—they know a brave from a coward.
When a boy, I saw nothing but the bison and the
deer. I went to the hunts, and I saw the cougar and
the bear. This made Mahtoree a man. He talked
with his mother no more. His ears were open to the
wisdom of the old men. They told him every thing
—they told him of the Big-knives. He went on the
war-path. He was then the last; now, he is the first.
What Dahcotah dare say he will go before Mahtoree
into the hunting-grounds of the Pawnees? The chiefs

met him at their doors, and they said, my son is without
a home. They gave him their lodges, they gave
him their riches, and they gave him their daughters.
Then Mahtoree became a chief, as his fathers had
been. He struck the warriors of all the nations, and
he could have chosen wives from the Pawnees, the
Omawhaws, and the Konzas; but he looked at the
hunting-grounds, and not at his village. He thought
a horse was pleasanter than a Dahcotah girl. But
he found a flower on the prairies, and he plucked it
and brought it into his lodge. He forgets that he is
the master of a single horse. He gives them all to
the stranger, for Mahtoree is not a thief; he will only
keep the flower he found on the prairie. Her feet
are very tender. She cannot walk to the door of her
father; she will stay, in the lodge of a warrior for
ever.”

When he had finished this extraordinary address,
the Teton awaited to have it translated, with the air
of a suitor who entertained no very disheartening
doubts of his success. The trapper had not lost a
syllable of the speech, and he now prepared himself
to render it into English in such a manner as should
leave its principal idea even more obscure than in the
original. But as his reluctant lips were in the act of
parting, Ellen lifted a finger, and with a keen glance
from her quick eye, at the still attentive Inez, she interrupted
him.

“Spare your breath;” she said; “all that a savage
says is not to be repeated before a Christian
lady.”

Inez started, blushed, and bowed with an air of
reserve, as she coldly thanked the old man for his
intentions, and observed that she could now wish to
be alone.

“My daughters have no need of ears to understand
what a great Dahcotah says,” returned the trapper,
addressing himself to the expecting Mahtoree. “The

look he has given, and the signs he has made, are
enough. They understand him; they wish to think of
his words; for the children of great braves, such as
their fathers are, do nothing without much thought.”

With this explanation, so flattering to the energy
of his eloquence, and so promising to his future
hopes, the Teton was every way content. He made
the customary ejaculation of assent, and prepared to
retire. Saluting the females, in the cold but dignified
manner of his people, he drew his robe about him,
and moved from the spot where he had stood with
an air of ill-concealed triumph.

But there had been a stricken, though a motionless
and unobserved auditor of the foregoing scene.
Not a syllable had fallen from the lips of the long
and anxiously expected husband, that had not gone
directly to the heart of his unoffending wife. In this
manner had he wooed her from the lodge of her father,
and it was to listen to similar pictures of the
renown and deeds of the greatest brave in her tribe,
that she had shut her ears to the tender tales of so
many of the Sioux youths.

As the Teton turned to leave his lodge, in the
manner just mentioned, he found this unexpected and
half forgotten object before him. She stood, in the
humble guise and with the shrinking air of an Indian
girl, holding the pledge of their former loves in her
arms, directly in his path. Starting for a single instant,
the chief regained the marble-like indifference
of countenance, which distinguished in so remarkable
a degree the restrained or more artificial expression
of his features, and signed to her, with an air of authority,
to give place.

“Is not Tachechana the daughter of a chief?”
demanded a subdued voice, in which pride struggled
fearfully with anguish; “were not her brothers
braves?”

“Go; the men are calling their partisan. He has
no ears for a woman.”

“No,” replied the supplicant; “it is not the voice
of Tachechana that you hear, but this boy, speaking
with the tongue of his mother. He is the son of a
chief and his words will go up to his father's ears.
Listen to what he says. When was Mahtoree hungry
and Tachechana had not food for him? When
did he go on the path of the Pawnees and find it
empty, that my mother did not weep? When did
he come back with the marks of their blows, that
she did not sing? What Sioux girl has given a brave
a son like me? Look at me well, that you may know
me. My eyes are the eagle's. I look at the sun and
laugh. In a little time the Dahcotahs will follow me
to the hunts and on the war-path. Why does my father
turn his eyes from the woman that gives me
milk? Why has he so soon forgotten the daughter
of a mighty Sioux?”

There was a single instant, as the exulting father
suffered his cold eye to wander to the face of the
laughing boy, that the stern nature of the Teton
seemed touched. But shaking off the grateful sentiment,
like one who would gladly be rid of any painful,
because reproachful, emotion, he laid his hand
calmly on the arm of his wife, and led her directly
in front of Inez. Pointing to the sweet countenance
that was beaming on her own, with a look of tenderness
and commiseration, he paused, to allow his wife
to contemplate a loveliness, which was quite as excellent
to her ingenuous mind as it had proved dangerous
to the character of her faithless husband.
When he thought abundant time had passed to make
the contrast sufficiently striking, he suddenly raised
a small mirror, that dangled at her breast, an ornament
he had himself bestowed in an hour of fondness
as a compliment to her beauty, and placed her own

dark image in its place. Wrapping his robe again
about him, the Teton motioned to the trapper to follow,
and stalked haughtily from the lodge, muttering,
as he went—

“Mahtoree is very wise! What nation has so great
a chief as the Dahcotahs?”

Tachechana stood for a minute, as if frozen into
a statue of humility. Her mild and usually joyous
countenance worked, as though the struggle within
was about to dissolve the connexion between her
soul and that more material part whose deformity
was becoming so loathsome. Inez and Ellen were
utterly ignorant of the nature of her interview with
her husband, though the quick and sharpened wits of
the latter led her to suspect a truth, to which the entire
innocence of the former furnished no clue.
They were both, however, about to tender those
sympathies, which are so natural to, and so graceful
in the sex, when their necessity seemed suddenly to
cease. The convulsions in the features of the young
Sioux disappeared, and her countenance became cold
and rigid, like chiselled stone. A single expression
of subdued anguish, which had made its impression
on a brow that had rarely before contracted with sorrow,
alone remained. It was never removed, in all
the changes of seasons, fortunes, and years, which,
in the vicissitudes of a suffering, female, savage life,
she was subsequently doomed to endure. As in the
case of a premature blight, let the plant quicken and
revive as it may, the effects of that withering touch
were always present.

Tachechana first stripped her person of every
vestige of those rude but highly prized ornaments,
which the liberality of her husband had been wont
to lavish on her, and she tendered them meekly, and
without a murmur, as an offering to the superiority
of Inez. The bracelets were forced from her wrists,
the complicated mazes of beads from her leggings,

and the broad silver band from her brow. Then she
paused, long and painfully. But it would seem, that
the resolution, she had once adopted, was not to be
conquered by the lingering emotions of any affection,
however natural. The boy himself was next laid at
the feet of her supposed rival, and well might the
self abased wife of the Teton believe that the burden
of her sacrifice was now full.

While Inez and Ellen stood regarding these several
strange movements with eyes of wonder, a low soft
musical voice was heard saying in a language, that to
them was unintelligible—

“A strange tongue will tell my boy the manner to
become a man. He will hear sounds that are new,
but he will learn them, and forget the voice of his
mother. It is the will of the Wahcondah, and a
Sioux girl should not complain. Speak to him softly,
for his ears are very little; when he is big, your
words may be louder. Let him not be a girl, for
very sad is the life of a woman. Teach him to keep
his eyes on the men. Show him how to strike them
that do him wrong, and let him never forget to return
blow for blow. When he goes to hunt, the flower of
the Pale-faces,” she concluded, using in bitterness the
metaphor which had been supplied by the imagination
of her truant husband, “will whisper softly in
his ears that the skin of his mother was red, and that
she was once the Fawn of the Dahcotahs.”

Tachechana pressed a kiss on the lips of her son,
and then withdrew to the farther side of the lodge.
Here she drew her light calico robe over her head,
and took her seat, in token of her humility, on the
naked earth. All the efforts of her companions, to
attract her attention, were fruitless. She neither
heard their remonstrances, nor felt their gentle touch.
Once or twice her voice rose, in a sort of wailing
song, from beneath her quivering mantle, but it never
mounted into the full wildness of savage music. In

this manner she remained unseen for hours, while
events were occurring without the lodge, which not
only materially changed the complexion of her own
fortunes, but left a lasting and deep impression on
the future movements of the wandering Sioux tribe.