uch rattling blades as himself and his Captain--who would have been
disposed to lay the flat of his sword smartly across the shoulders of
the orderly, could he have dreamed of mention in such irreverent
fellowship--they had no chance with the women, and for his own part this
made him very sad. And he contrived to look so for about a minute, as he
led the Captain's horse up and down before the door of the
council-house, while Choo-qualee-qualoo, at one end of his beat, stood
among a clump of laurel and talked to him as he came and went, and
Willinawaugh, in the shadowy recesses of a neighboring hut, watched
through the open door how his scheme took effect.

It made him very sad, the soldier said, mournfully, for the girls to
like other fellows better than him--as they generally did!

And Choo-qualee-qualoo broke off to say here that she did not discern
why such preference should be, for this soldier's hair was the color of
the Captain's gold lace on his red coat (the orderly was called
"Carrots" by his comrades), and he had a face with--and at a loss she
dabbled the tips of her fingers delicately about the bridge of her nose
and her eyes to intimate the freckles on his fair skin, which
beauty-spots she evidently admired.

The Scotchman's French wife was a stunner, the orderly was good enough
to declare again, and everybody else thought so too. But he had
overheard Captain Demere say to Captain Stuart that her husband had no
right to bring her to this western wilderness, and that that terrible
journey of so many hundred miles, keeping up on foot with men, was
enough to have killed her; and Captain Stuart had replied that she would
make a fine pace-setter for infantry in heavy marching order. The
orderly protested that for his part, if he were a condemned fine woman
like that, he wouldn't live in a wilderness--he would run away from the
Scotchman and go back to wherever she came from. Handsomest eyes he ever
saw--_except two eyes_!

Here Choo-qualee-qualoo gave Odalie a broadside glance which left no
doubt as to whose eyes this exception was supposed to refer, and put two
or three strands of the red beads into her mouth, showing her narrow
sharp teeth as she laughed with pleasure and pride.

Thus it was that Odalie was apprised of the fact that she was regarded
by the Indians as a French prisoner in the hands of the English, and
that the young soldier's use of the idea of capture by her husband,
figuratively, as in th