but an hour or two before in
the hands of Braxley. Stooping down, and making as if he would have
raised the convulsed man in his arms, he drew the parchment from its
hiding-place, and, unobserved by the Indians, transferred it to a secret
place in his own garments. He then rose up, and stood like the rest,
looking upon the prisoner, until the fit had passed off, which it did in
but a few moments, Nathan starting to his feet, and looking around him in
the greatest wildness, as if, for a moment, not only unconscious of what
had befallen him, but even of his captivity.

But unconsciousness of the latter calamity was of no great duration, and
was dispelled by the old chief saying, but with looks of drunken respect,
that had succeeded his insane fury--"Me brudder great-medicine white-man!
great white-man medicine! Me Wenonga, great Injun-captain, great
kill-man-white-man, kill-all-man, man-man, squaw-man, little papoose-man!
Me make medicine-man brudder-man! Medicine-man tell Wenonga all
Jibbenainosay?--where find Jibbenainosay? How kill Jibbenainosay? kill
white-man's devil-man! Medicine-man tell Injun-man why medicine-man come
Injun town? steal Injun prisoner? steal Injun hoss? Me Wenonga,--me good
brudder medicine-man."

This gibberish, with which he seemed, besides expressing much new-born
good will, to intimate that his cause lay in the belief that the prisoner
was a great white conjuror, who could help him to a solution of sundry
interesting questions, the old chief pronounced with much solemnity and
suavity; and he betrayed an inclination to continue it, the captors of
Nathan standing by and looking on with vast and eager interest. But a
sudden and startling yell from the Indians who had charge of the young
Virginian, preceded by an exclamation from the renegade who had stolen
among them, upset the curiosity of the party,--or rather substituted a
new object for admiration, which set them all running towards the fire,
where Roland lay bound. The cause of the excitement was nothing less than
the discovery which Doe had just made, of the identity of the prisoner
with Roland Forrester, whom he had with his own hands delivered into
those of the merciless Piankeshaws, and whose escape from them and sudden
appearance in the Shawnee village were events just as wonderful to the
savages as the supposed powers of the white medicine-man, his associate.

But there was still a third prodigy to be wondered at. The third prisoner