using in bitterness the metaphor which had been supplied by
the imagination of her truant husband, "will whisper softly in his ears
that the skin of his mother was red, and that she was once the Fawn of
the Dahcotahs."

Tachechana pressed a kiss on the lips of her son, and withdrew to the
farther side of the lodge. Here she drew her light calico robe over her
head, and took her seat, in token of humility, on the naked earth. All
efforts, to attract her attention, were fruitless. She neither heard
remonstrances, nor felt the touch. Once or twice her voice rose, in a
sort of wailing song, from beneath her quivering mantle, but it never
mounted into the wildness of savage music. In this manner she remained
unseen for hours, while events were occurring without the lodge, which
not only materially changed the complexion of her own fortunes, but left
a lasting and deep impression on the future movements of the wandering
Sioux.

CHAPTER XXVII

I'll no swaggerers: I am in good name and fame with the very best:
--shut the door;--there come no swaggerers here: I have not lived
all this while, to have swaggering now: shut the door, I pray you.
--Shakspeare.

Mahtoree encountered, at the door of his lodge, Ishmael, Abiram,
and Esther. The first glance of his eye, at the countenance of the
heavy-moulded squatter, served to tell the cunning Teton, that the
treacherous truce he had made, with these dupes of his superior
sagacity, was in some danger of a violent termination.

"Look you here, old grey-beard," said Ishmael, seizing the trapper, and
whirling him round as if he had been a top; "that I am tired of carrying
on a discourse with fingers and thumbs, instead of a tongue, ar' a
natural fact; so you'll play linguister and put my words into Indian,
without much caring whether they suit the stomach of a Red-skin or not."

"Say on, friend," calmly returned the trapper; "they shall be given as
plainly as you send them."

"Friend!" repeated the squatter, eyeing the other for an instant, with
an expression of indefinable meaning. "But it is no more than a word,
and sounds break no bones, and survey no farms. Tell this thieving
Sioux, then, that I come to claim the conditions of our solemn bargain,
made at the foot of the rock."

When the trapper had rendered his meaning into the Sioux language,
Mahtoree demanded, with an air of surprise--

"Is my brother cold? buf