whose forebodings of evil had
been so soon and so dreadfully realised.

In the meanwhile, the Indians on the road-side began the business for
which they had assembled, that seemed to be, in the first place, the
division of spoils, consisting of the guns, horses, and clothes of the
dead, with sundry other articles, which, but for his unhappy condition,
Roland would have wondered to behold: for there were among them rolls of
cloth and calico, heaps of hawks'-bells and other Indian trinkets,
knives, pipes, powder and ball, and other such articles, even to a keg or
two of the fire-water, enough to stock an Indian trading-house. These,
wherever and however obtained, were distributed equally among the Indians
by a man of lighter skin than themselves,--a half-breed, as Roland
supposed,--who seemed to exercise some authority among them, though ever
deferring in all things to an old Indian of exceedingly fierce and malign
aspect, though wasted and withered into the semblance of a consumptive
wolf, who sat upon a stone, buried in gloomy abstraction, from which,
time by time, he awoke, to direct the dispersion of the valuables,
through the hands of his deputy, with exceeding great gravity and state.

The distribution being effected, and evidently to the satisfaction of all
present, the savages turned their looks upon the prisoner, eyeing him
with mingled triumph and exultation; and the old presiding officer, or
chief, as he seemed to be, shaking off his abstraction, got upon his feet
and made him a harangue, imitating therein the ancient Piankeshaw; though
with this difference, that, whereas the latter spoke entirely in his own
tongue, the former thought fit, among abundance of Indian phrases, to
introduce some that were sufficiently English to enable the soldier to
guess, at least, a part of his meaning. His oration, however, as far as
Roland could understand it, consisted chiefly in informing him that he
was a very great chief, who had killed abundance of white people, men,
women, and children, whose scalps had, for thirty years and more, been
hanging in the smoke of his Shawnee lodge,--that he was very brave, and
loved a white man's blood better than whisky, and that he never spared it
out of pity,--adding as the cause, and seeming well pleased that he could
boast a deficiency so well befitting a warrior, that he had "_no
heart_,"--his interior being framed of stone as hard as the flinty rock
under his feet. This exordium finis