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 hear.
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 outdoors; 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 ventured 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 that 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 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 footsteps, 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 habitation 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 pre-eminent 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 sweet-scented 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 imagination. Sustained by so 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 (or 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 civilisation.