The Doctor, with infinite labour to himself and Asinus, had maintained a position in the very centre of the Siouxes, so long as there existed the smallest reason for believing that any of the missiles of Ishmael might arrive in contact with his person.
After this danger had diminished, or rather disappeared entirely, his own courage revived, while that of his steed began to droop.
To this mutual but very material change was owing the fact, that the rider and the ass were now to be sought among that portion of the band who formed a sort of rear-guard.
Hither, then, the trapper contrived to turn his steed, without exciting the suspicions of any of his subtle companions.
“Friend,” commenced the old man, when he found himself in a situation favourable to discourse, “should you like to pass a dozen years among the savages with a shaved head, and a painted countenance, with, perhaps, a couple of wives and five or six children of the half breed, to call you father?”
“Impossible!” exclaimed the startled naturalist. “I am indisposed to matrimony in general, and more especially to all admixture of the varieties of species, which only tend to tarnish the beauty and to interrupt the harmony of nature. Moreover, it is a painful innovation on the order of all nomenclatures.”
“Ay, ay, you have reason enough for your distaste to such a life; but should these Siouxes get you fairly into their village, such would be your luck, as certain as that the sun rises and sets at the pleasure of the Lord.”
“Marry me to a woman who is not adorned with the comeliness of the species!” responded the Doctor. “Of what crime have I been guilty, that so grievous a punishment should await the offence?
To marry a man against the movements of his will, is to do a violence to human nature!”
“Now, that you speak of natur’, I have hopes that the gift of reason has not altogether deserted your brain,” returned the old man, with a covert expression playing about the angles of his deep set eyes, which betrayed he was not entirely destitute of humour. “Nay, they may conceive you a remarkable subject for their kindness, and for that matter marry you to five or six.
I have known, in my days, favoured chiefs who had numberless wives.”
“But why should they meditate this vengeance?” demanded the Doctor, whose hair began to rise, as if each fibre was possessed of sensibility; “what evil have I done?”
“It is the fashion of their kindness.
When they come to learn that you are a great medicine, they will adopt you in the tribe, and some mighty chief will give you his name, and perhaps his daughter, or it may be a wife or two of his own, who have dwelt long in his lodge, and of whose value he is a judge by experience.”
“The Governor and Founder of natural harmony protect me!” ejaculated the Doctor. “I have no affinity to a single consort, much less to duplicates and triplicates of the class!
I shall certainly essay a flight from their abodes before I mingle in so violent a conjunction.”
“There is reason in your words; but why not attempt the race you speak of now?”
The naturalist looked fearfully around, as if he had an inclination to make an instant exhibition of his desperate intention; but the dusky figures, who were riding on every side of him, seemed suddenly tripled in number, and the darkness, that was already thickening on the prairie, appeared in his eyes to possess the glare of high noon.
“It would be premature, and reason forbids it,” he answered. “Leave me, venerable venator, to the council of my own thoughts, and when my plans are properly classed, I will advise you of my resolutions.”
“Resolutions!” repeated the old man, shaking his head a little contemptuously as he gave the rein to his horse, and allowed him to mingle with the steeds of the savages.
“Resolution is a word that is talked of in the settlements, and felt on the borders.
Does my brother know the beast on which the Pale-face rides?” he continued, addressing a gloomy looking warrior in his own tongue, and making a motion with his arm that at the same time directed his attention to the naturalist and the meek Asinus.
The Teton turned his eyes for a minute on the animal, but disdained to manifest the smallest portion of that wonder he had felt, in common with all his companions, on first viewing so rare a quadruped.
The trapper was not ignorant, that while asses and mules were beginning to be known to those tribes who dwelt nearest the Mexicos, they were not usually encountered so far north as the waters of La Platte.
He therefore managed to read the mute astonishment, that lay so deeply concealed in the tawny visage of the savage, and took his measures accordingly.
“Does my brother think that the rider is a warrior of the Pale-faces?” he demanded, when he believed that sufficient time had elapsed, for a full examination of the pacific mien of the naturalist.
The flash of scorn, which shot across the features of the Teton, was visible, even by the dim light of the stars. “Is a Dahcotah a fool?” was the answer.
“They are a wise nation, whose eyes are never shut; much do I wonder, that they have not seen the great medicine of the Big-knives!”
“Wagh!” exclaimed his companion, suffering the whole of his amazement to burst out of his dark rigid countenance at the surprise, like a flash of lightning illuminating the gloom of midnight.
“The Dahcotah knows that my tongue is not forked.
Let him open his eyes wider.
Does he not see a very great medicine?”
The light was not necessary to recall to the savage each feature in the really remarkable costume and equipage of Dr. Battius.
In common with the rest of the band, and in conformity with the universal practice of the Indians, this warrior, while he had suffered no gaze of idle curiosity to disgrace his manhood, had not permitted a single distinctive mark, which might characterise any one of the strangers, to escape his vigilance.
He knew the air, the stature, the dress, and the features, even to the colour of the eyes and of the hair, of every one of the Big-knives, whom he had thus strangely encountered, and deeply had he ruminated on the causes, which could have led a party, so singularly constituted, into the haunts of the rude inhabitants of his native wastes.
He had already considered the several physical powers of the whole party, and had duly compared their abilities with what he supposed might have been their intentions.
Warriors they were not, for the Big-knives, like the Siouxes, left their women in their villages when they went out on the bloody path.
The same objections applied to them as hunters, and even as traders, the two characters under which the white men commonly appeared in their villages.
He had heard of a great council, at which the Menahashah, or Long-knives, and the Washsheomantiqua, or Spaniards, had smoked together, when the latter had sold to the former their incomprehensible rights over those vast regions, through which his nation had roamed, in freedom, for so many ages.
His simple mind had not been able to embrace the reasons why one people should thus assume a superiority over the possessions of another, and it will readily be perceived, that at the hint just received from the trapper, he was not indisposed to fancy that some of the hidden subtilty of that magical influence, of which he was so firm a believer, was about to be practised by the unsuspecting subject of their conversation, in furtherance of these mysterious claims.
Abandoning, therefore, all the reserve and dignity of his manner, under the conscious helplessness of ignorance, he turned to the old man, and stretching forth his arms, as if to denote how much he lay at his mercy, he said—
“Let my father look at me.
I am a wild man of the prairies; my body is naked; my hands empty; my skin red.
I have struck the Pawnees, the Konzas, the Omahaws, the Osages, and even the Long-knives.
I am a man amid warriors, but a woman among the conjurors.
Let my father speak: the ears of the Teton are open.
He listens like a deer to the step of the cougar.”
“Such are the wise and uns’archable ways of One who alone knows good from evil!” exclaimed the trapper, in English. “To some He grants cunning, and on others He bestows the gift of manhood!
It is humbling, and it is afflicting to see so noble a creatur’ as this, who has fou’t in many a bloody fray, truckling before his superstition like a beggar asking for the bones you would throw to the dogs.
The Lord will forgive me for playing with the ignorance of the savage, for He knows I do it in no mockery of his state, or in idle vaunting of my own; but in order to save mortal life, and to give justice to the wronged, while I defeat the deviltries of the wicked!