lance. He knew the air, the stature, the dress, and the
features, even to the colour of the eyes and of the hair, of every one
of the Big-knives, whom he had thus strangely encountered, and deeply
had he ruminated on the causes, which could have led a party, so
singularly constituted, into the haunts of the rude inhabitants of his
native wastes. He had already considered the several physical powers
of the whole party, and had duly compared their abilities with what he
supposed might have been their intentions. Warriors they were not, for
the Big-knives, like the Siouxes, left their women in their villages
when they went out on the bloody path. The same objections applied to
them as hunters, and even as traders, the two characters under which the
white men commonly appeared in their villages. He had heard of a
great council, at which the Menahashah, or Long-knives, and the
Washsheomantiqua, or Spaniards, had smoked together, when the latter
had sold to the former their incomprehensible rights over those vast
regions, through which his nation had roamed, in freedom, for so many
ages. His simple mind had not been able to embrace the reasons why one
people should thus assume a superiority over the possessions of another,
and it will readily be perceived, that at the hint just received from
the trapper, he was not indisposed to fancy that some of the hidden
subtilty of that magical influence, of which he was so firm a believer,
was about to be practised by the unsuspecting subject of their
conversation, in furtherance of these mysterious claims. Abandoning,
therefore, all the reserve and dignity of his manner, under the
conscious helplessness of ignorance, he turned to the old man, and
stretching forth his arms, as if to denote how much he lay at his mercy,
he said--

"Let my father look at me. I am a wild man of the prairies; my body
is naked; my hands empty; my skin red. I have struck the Pawnees, the
Konzas, the Omahaws, the Osages, and even the Long-knives. I am a man
amid warriors, but a woman among the conjurors. Let my father speak: the
ears of the Teton are open. He listens like a deer to the step of the
cougar."

"Such are the wise and uns'archable ways of One who alone knows good
from evil!" exclaimed the trapper, in English. "To some He grants
cunning, and on others He bestows the gift of manhood! It is humbling,
and it is afflicting to see so noble a creatur' as this, who has fou't
in many a bloody fray, truckl