een
the warrior of the prairies and the experienced old trapper, the latter
proceeded to give his directions to Paul, concerning the arrangements
of the contemplated halt. While Inez and Ellen were dismounting, and
Middleton and the bee-hunter were attending to their comforts, the
discourse was continued, sometimes in the language of the natives,
but often, as Paul and the Doctor mingled their opinions with the two
principal speakers, in the English tongue. There was a keen and subtle
trial of skill between the Pawnee and the trapper, in which each
endeavoured to discover the objects of the other, without betraying
his own interest in the investigation. As might be expected, when the
struggle was between adversaries so equal, the result of the encounter
answered the expectations of neither. The latter had put all the
interrogatories his ingenuity and practice could suggest, concerning the
state of the tribe of the Loups, their crops, their store of provisions
for the ensuing winter, and their relations with their different warlike
neighbours without extorting any answer, which, in the slightest degree,
elucidated the cause of his finding a solitary warrior so far from his
people. On the other hand, while the questions of the Indian were far
more dignified and delicate, they were equally ingenious. He commented
on the state of the trade in peltries, spoke of the good or ill success
of many white hunters, whom he had either encountered, or heard named,
and even alluded to the steady march, which the nation of his great
father, as he cautiously termed the government of the States, was making
towards the hunting-grounds of his tribe. It was apparent, however, by
the singular mixture of interest, contempt, and indignation, that were
occasionally gleaming through the reserved manner of this warrior, that
he knew the strange people, who were thus trespassing on his native
rights, much more by report than by any actual intercourse. This
personal ignorance of the whites was as much betrayed by the manner
in which he regarded the females, as by the brief, but energetic,
expressions which occasionally escaped him.

While speaking to the trapper he suffered his wandering glances to stray
towards the intellectual and nearly infantile beauty of Inez, as one
might be supposed to gaze upon the loveliness of an ethereal being.
It was very evident that he now saw, for the first time, one of those
females, of whom the fathers of his tribe