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 frozen into a statue of humility.
Her mild and usually joyous countenance worked, as if the struggle within was about to dissolve the connection 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 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 humility, on the naked earth.
All efforts, to attract her attention, were fruitless.
She neither heard remonstrances, nor felt the touch.
Once or twice her voice rose, in a sort of wailing song, from beneath her quivering mantle, but it never mounted into the 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.
CHAPTER XXVII
I’ll no swaggerers: I am in good name and fame with the very best:
—shut the door;—there come no swaggerers here: I have not lived all this while, to have swaggering now: shut the door, I pray you.
—Shakspeare.
Mahtoree encountered, at the door of his lodge, Ishmael, Abiram, and Esther.
The first glance of his eye, at the countenance of the heavy-moulded squatter, served to tell the cunning Teton, that the treacherous truce he had made, with these dupes of his superior sagacity, was in some danger of a violent termination.
“Look you here, old grey-beard,” said Ishmael, seizing the trapper, and whirling him round as if he had been a top; “that I am tired of carrying on a discourse with fingers and thumbs, instead of a tongue, ar’ a natural fact; so you’ll play linguister and put my words into Indian, without much caring whether they suit the stomach of a Red-skin or not.”
“Say on, friend,” calmly returned the trapper; “they shall be given as plainly as you send them.”
“Friend!” repeated the squatter, eyeing the other for an instant, with an expression of indefinable meaning. “But it is no more than a word, and sounds break no bones, and survey no farms.