good-looking, ay, and an honest-looking youth, but
the winds of Heaven are not more deceitful than these savages, when the
devil has fairly beset them. Had the Pawnee been a Teton, or one of them
heartless Mingoes, that used to be prowling through the woods of York, a
time back, that is, some sixty years agone, we should have seen his back
and not his face turned towards us. My heart had its misgivings when I
saw the lad choose the better horse, for it would be as easy to leave us
with that beast, as it would for a nimble pigeon to part company from a
flock of noisy and heavy winged crows. But you see that truth is in the
boy, and make a Red-skin once your friend, he is yours so long as you
deal honestly by him."

"What may be the distance to the sources of this stream?" demanded
Doctor Battius, whose eyes were rolling over the whirling eddies of the
current, with a very portentous expression of doubt. "At what distance
may its secret springs be found?"

"That may be as the weather proves. I warrant me your legs would be
a-weary before you had followed its bed into the Rocky Mountains; but
then there are seasons when it might be done without wetting a foot."

"And in what particular divisions of the year do these periodical
seasons occur?"

"He that passes this spot a few months from this time, will find that
foaming water-course a desert of drifting sand."

The naturalist pondered deeply. Like most others, who are not endowed
with a superfluity of physical fortitude, the worthy man had found the
danger of passing the river, in so simple a manner, magnifying itself
in his eyes so rapidly, as the moment of adventure approached, that he
actually contemplated the desperate effort of going round the river, in
order to escape the hazard of crossing it. It may not be necessary to
dwell on the incredible ingenuity, with which terror will at any time
prop a tottering argument. The worthy Obed had gone over the whole
subject, with commendable diligence, and had just arrived at the
consoling conclusion, that there was nearly as much glory in discerning
the hidden sources of so considerable a stream, as in adding a plant,
or an insect, to the lists of the learned, when the Pawnee reached the
shore for the second time. The old man took his seat, with the utmost
deliberation, in the vessel of skin (so soon as it had been duly
arranged for his reception), and having carefully disposed of Hector
between his legs, he beckoned to