odge of Mahtoree, and, in
obedience to the sign of the chief, he held his way towards it with slow
and reluctant steps. But there were others present, who were equally
interested in the approaching conference, whose apprehensions were
not to be so easily suppressed. The watchful eye and jealous ears
of Middleton had taught him enough to fill his soul with horrible
forebodings. With an incredible effort he succeeded in gaining his feet,
and called aloud to the retiring trapper--

"I conjure you, old man, if the love you bore my parents was more than
words, or if the love you bear your God is that of a Christian man,
utter not a syllable that may wound the ear of that innocent--"

Exhausted in spirit and fettered in limbs, he then fell, like an
inanimate log, to the earth, where he lay like one dead.

Paul had however caught the clue and completed the exhortation, in his
peculiar manner.

"Harkee, old trapper," he shouted, vainly endeavouring at the same time
to make a gesture of defiance with his hand; "if you ar' about to play
the interpreter, speak such words to the ears of that damnable savage,
as becomes a white man to use, and a heathen to hear. Tell him, from me,
that if he does or says the thing that is uncivil to the girl, called
Nelly Wade, that I'll curse him with my dying breath; that I'll pray
for all good Christians in Kentucky to curse him; sitting and standing;
eating and drinking, fighting, praying, or at horse-races; in-doors
and outdoors; in summer or winter, or in the month of March in short
I'll--ay, it ar' a fact, morally true--I'll haunt him, if the ghost of a
Pale-face can contrive to lift itself from a grave made by the hands of
a Red-skin!"

Having thus ventured the most terrible denunciation he could devise, and
the one which, in the eyes of the honest bee-hunter, there seemed
the greatest likelihood of his being able to put in execution, he was
obliged to await the fruits of his threat, with that resignation which
would be apt to govern a western border-man who, in addition to the
prospects just named, had the advantage of contemplating them in fetters
and bondage. We shall not detain the narrative, to relate the quaint
morals with which he next endeavoured to cheer the drooping spirits
of his more sensitive companion, or the occasional pithy and peculiar
benedictions that he pronounced, on all the bands of the Dahcotahs,
commencing with those whom he accused of stealing or murdering, on t