chief seldom permitted more to remain than sufficed for the wants of the
day, perfectly assured that all must suffer before hunger, the bane of
savage life, could lay its fell fangs on so important a victim.

Immediately beneath the favourite bow of the chief, and encircled in a
sort of magical ring of spears, shields, lances and arrows, all of which
had in their time done good service, was suspended the mysterious and
sacred medicine-bag. It was highly-wrought in wampum, and profusely
ornamented with beads and porcupine's quills, after the most cunning
devices of Indian ingenuity. The peculiar freedom of Mahtoree's
religious creed has been more than once intimated, and by a singular
species of contradiction, he appeared to have lavished his attentions
on this emblem of a supernatural agency, in a degree that was precisely
inverse to his faith. It was merely the manner in which the Sioux
imitated the well-known expedient of the Pharisees, "in order that they
might be seen of men."

The tent had not, however, been entered by its owner since his return
from the recent expedition. As the reader has already anticipated, it
had been made the prison of Inez and Ellen. The bride of Middleton was
seated on a simple couch of sweet-scented herbs covered with skins.
She had already suffered so much, and witnessed so many wild and
unlooked-for events, within the short space of her captivity, that every
additional misfortune fell with a diminished force on her seemingly
devoted head. Her cheeks were bloodless, her dark and usually animated
eye was contracted in an expression of settled concern, and her form
appeared shrinking and sensitive, nearly to extinction. But in the midst
of these evidences of natural weakness, there were at times such an air
of pious resignation, such gleams of meek but holy hope lighting her
countenance, as might well have rendered it a question whether the
hapless captive was most a subject of pity, or of admiration. All the
precepts of father Ignatius were riveted in her faithful memory, and
not a few of his pious visions were floating before her imagination.
Sustained by so sacred resolutions, the mild, the patient and the
confiding girl was bowing her head to this new stroke of Providence,
with the same sort of meekness as she would have submitted to any other
prescribed penitence for her sins, though nature, at moments, warred
powerfully, with so compelled a humility.

On the other hand, Ellen had ex