ke white?"

"The Indian is the child of the Great Spirit; the pale-face is the child
of the evil spirit; these are the hunting grounds of the red man, and
the pale-face has no right here."

It was the same old plea which Finley had heard from the first day he
held converse with a member of the American race, and which he knew
would be dinned into his ears to the very end, but he never listened to
it with impatience.

"The hunting grounds are broad and long, the streams are deep and full
of fish, the woods abound with game, there is room for the red men and
pale-faces to live beside each other."

"But they can never live beside each other!" exclaimed The Panther, with
a deadlier flash of the eye; "the pale-faces are dogs; they steal the
hunting grounds from the Indians; they rob and cheat them; they shoot
our warriors and then call us brothers!"

No words can picture the scorn which the chieftain threw into these
expressions. He flung his head back with an upward graceful swing of the
arms, which added immense force to his declaration. It was an
unconscious but a fine dramatic effect.

The chief difficulty in a "pow-wow" of this nature was that the balance
of argument was invariably on the side of the Indian. The white men had
invaded the hunting grounds of the aborigines. The French and Indian war
was a prodigious struggle between the two rival nations of Europe as to
which should own those hunting grounds; neither thought or cared for the
rights of the red man; they had never done so.

The history of the settlement of this country, as has been said, is
simply a history of violence, wrong, fraud, rapine, injustice,
persecution, and crime on the part of the Caucasian against the
American, relieved now and then, at remote periods, by such wise and
beneficent acts as the Quaker treaty under the old tree at Shackamaxon,
and stained with the hue of hell by such crimes as the massacre of the
Moravian Indians, the capture of the Seminole chieftain Osceola under a
flag of truce, the slaughter in later days of Colonel Chivington, and
innumerable other instances of barbarity never surpassed by the most
ferocious savages of the dark continent.

"Many of the pale-faces are evil," said the missionary. "The words of
Wa-on-mon are true of a great number, I am sorry to say, but they are
not true of all."

"They are true of all. They are true of the missionary."

The firelight showed a deeper flush that sprang to the face of