They, who wade the Missouri, are the warriors of my great father, who has sent them on his message; but we are peace-runners.
The white men and the red are neighbours, and they wish to be friends.—Do not the Omahaws visit the Loups, when the tomahawk is buried in the path between the two nations?”
“The Omahaws are welcome.”
“And the Yanktons, and the burnt-wood Tetons, who live in the elbow of the river, ‘with muddy water,’ do they not come into the lodges of the Loups and smoke?”
“The Tetons are liars!” exclaimed the other. “They dare not shut their eyes in the night.
No; they sleep in the sun.
See,” he added, pointing with fierce triumph to the frightful ornaments of his leggings, “their scalps are so plenty, that the Pawnees tread on them!
Go; let a Sioux live in banks of snow; the plains and buffaloes are for men!”
“Ah! the secret is out,” said the trapper to Middleton, who was an attentive, because a deeply interested, observer of what was passing. “This good-looking young Indian is scouting on the track of the Siouxes—you may see it by his arrow-heads, and his paint; ay, and by his eye, too; for a Red-skin lets his natur’ follow the business he is on, be it for peace, or be it for war,—quiet, Hector, quiet.
Have you never scented a Pawnee afore, pup?—keep down, dog—keep down—my brother is right. The Siouxes are thieves.
Men of all colours and nations say it of them, and say it truly.
But the people from the rising sun are not Siouxes, and they wish to visit the lodges of the Loups.”
“The head of my brother is white,” returned the Pawnee, throwing one of those glances at the trapper, which were so remarkably expressive of distrust, intelligence, and pride, and then pointing, as he continued, towards the eastern horizon, “and his eyes have looked on many things—can he tell me the name of what he sees yonder—is it a buffaloe?”
“It looks more like a cloud, peeping above the skirt of the plain with the sunshine lighting its edges.
It is the smoke of the heavens.”
“It is a hill of the earth, and on its top are the lodges of Pale-faces!
Let the women of my brother wash their feet among the people of their own colour.”
“The eyes of a Pawnee are good, if he can see a white-skin so far.”
The Indian turned slowly towards the speaker, and after a pause of a moment he sternly demanded—
“Can my brother hunt?”
“Alas! I claim to be no better than a miserable trapper!”
“When the plain is covered with the buffaloes, can he see them?”
“No doubt, no doubt—it is far easier to see than to take a scampering bull.”
“And when the birds are flying from the cold, and the clouds are black with their feathers, can he see them too?”
“Ay, ay, it is not hard to find a duck, or a goose, when millions are darkening the heavens.”
“When the snow falls, and covers the lodges of the Long-knives, can the stranger see flakes in the air?”
“My eyes are none of the best now,” returned the old man a little resentfully, “but the time has been when I had a name for my sight!”
“The Red-skins find the Big-knives as easily as the strangers see the buffaloe, or the travelling birds, or the falling snow.
Your warriors think the Master of Life has made the whole earth white.
They are mistaken.
They are pale, and it is their own faces that they see.
Go! a Pawnee is not blind, that he need look long for your people!”
The warrior suddenly paused, and bent his face aside, like one who listened with all his faculties absorbed in the act.
Then turning the head of his horse, he rode to the nearest angle of the thicket, and looked intently across the bleak prairie, in a direction opposite to the side on which the party stood.
Returning slowly from this unaccountable, and to his observers, startling procedure, he riveted his eyes on Inez, and paced back and forth several times, with the air of one who maintained a warm struggle on some difficult point, in the recesses of his own thoughts.
He had drawn the reins of his impatient steed, and was seemingly about to speak, when his head again sunk on his chest, and he resumed his former attitude of attention.
Galloping like a deer, to the place of his former observations, he rode for a moment swiftly, in short and rapid circles, as if still uncertain of his course, and then darted away, like a bird that had been fluttering around its nest before it takes a distant flight.
After scouring the plain for a minute, he was lost to the eye behind a swell of the land.
The hounds, who had also manifested great uneasiness for some time, followed him for a little distance, and then terminated their chase by seating themselves on the ground, and raising their usual low, whining, and warning howls.
CHAPTER XIX
How if he will not stand?
—Shakspeare.
The several movements, related in the close of the preceding chapter, had passed in so short a space of time, that the old man, while he neglected not to note the smallest incident, had no opportunity of expressing his opinion concerning the stranger’s motives.
After the Pawnee had disappeared, however, he shook his head and muttered, while he walked slowly to the angle of the thicket that the Indian had just quitted—
“There are both scents and sounds in the air, though my miserable senses are not good enough to hear the one, or to catch the taint of the other.”
“There is nothing to be seen,” cried Middleton, who kept close at his side. “My eyes and my ears are good, and yet I can assure you that I neither hear nor see any thing.”
“Your eyes are good! and you are not deaf!” returned the other with a slight air of contempt; “no, lad, no; they may be good to see across a church, or to hear a town-bell, but afore you had passed a year in these prairies you would find yourself taking a turkey for a buffaloe, or conceiting, fifty times, that the roar of a buffaloe bull was the thunder of the Lord!
There is a deception of natur’ in these naked plains, in which the air throws up the images like water, and then it is hard to tell the prairies from a sea.
But yonder is a sign that a hunter never fails to know!”
The trapper pointed to a flight of vultures, that were sailing over the plain at no great distance, and apparently in the direction in which the Pawnee had riveted his eye.