ery
disheartening doubts of his success. The trapper had not lost a syllable
of the speech, and he now prepared himself to render it into English in
such a manner as should leave its principal idea even more obscure than
in the original. But as his reluctant lips were in the act of parting,
Ellen lifted a finger, and with a keen glance from her quick eye, at the
still attentive Inez, she interrupted him.

"Spare your breath," she said, "all that a savage says is not to be
repeated before a Christian lady."

Inez started, blushed, and bowed with an air of reserve, as she coldly
thanked the old man for his intentions, and observed that she could now
wish to be alone.

"My daughters have no need of ears to understand what a great Dahcotah
says," returned the trapper, addressing himself to the expecting
Mahtoree. "The look he has given, and the signs he has made, are enough.
They understand him; they wish to think of his words; for the children
of great braves, such as their fathers are, do nothing with out much
thought."

With this explanation, so flattering to the energy of his eloquence, and
so promising to his future hopes, the Teton was every way content.
He made the customary ejaculation of assent, and prepared to retire.
Saluting the females, in the cold but dignified manner of his people,
he drew his robe about him, and moved from the spot where he had stood,
with an air of ill-concealed triumph.

But there had been a stricken, though a motionless and unobserved
auditor of the foregoing scene. Not a syllable had fallen from the lips
of the long and anxiously expected husband, that had not gone directly
to the heart of his unoffending wife. In this manner had he wooed her
from the lodge of her father, and it was to listen to similar pictures
of the renown and deeds of the greatest brave in her tribe, that she had
shut her ears to the tender tales of so many of the Sioux youths.

As the Teton turned to leave his lodge, in the manner just mentioned, he
found this unexpected and half-forgotten object before him. She stood,
in the humble guise and with the shrinking air of an Indian girl,
holding the pledge of their former love in her arms, directly in his
path. Starting, the chief regained the marble-like indifference
of countenance, which distinguished in so remarkable a degree the
restrained or more artificial expression of his features, and signed to
her, with an air of authority to give place.

"Is not Tach