face, albeit no stranger to the use of their pigments and
unguents, still showed fair and freckled. His hair bore no resemblance
to their lank black locks; of an auburn hue and resolutely curling, it
defied the tonsure to which it had been for years subjected, coming out
crisp and ringleted close to his head where he was designed to be bald,
and on the top, where the "war-lock" was permitted to grow, it floated
backward in two long tangled red curls that gave the lie direct to the
Indian similitude affected by the two surmounting tips of eagle
feathers. He was arrayed in much splendor, according to aboriginal
standards; the fringed seams of his hunting shirt and leggings,
fashioned of fine white dressed doeskin, as pliable as "Canton silk
crape," were hung with fawns' trotters; his moccasins were white and
streaked with parti-colored paint; he had a curious prickly belt of
wolves' teeth, which intimated his moral courage as well as sylvan
prowess, for the slaying of these beasts was esteemed unlucky, and
shooting at them calculated to spoil the aim of a gun; many glancing,
glittering strings of "roanoke" swung around his neck.

Nothing could have been finer, athletically considered, than his
attitude at this moment of the trader's speculative observation. The
discoidal quartz chungke-stone[2] had been hurled with a tremendous
fling along the smooth sandy stretch of the yard, its flat edge, two
inches wide, and the curiously exact equipoise of its fashioning causing
it to bowl swiftly along a great distance, to fall only when the
original impetus should fail; his competitor, Wyejah, a sinewy, powerful
young brave, his buckskin garb steeped in some red dye that gave him the
look when at full speed of the first flying leaf of the falling season,
his ears split and barbarically distended on wire hoops[3] and hung with
silver rings, his moccasins scarlet, his black hair decorated with
cardinal wings, had just sent his heavy lance, twelve feet long,
skimming through the air; then Otasite, running swiftly but lightly
abreast with him, launched his own long lance with such force and nicety
of aim that its point struck the end of Wyejah's spear, still in flight
in mid-air, deflecting its direction, and sending it far afield from the
chungke-stone which it was designed in falling to touch. This fine cast
counted one point in the game, which is of eleven points, and the Indian
braves among the spectators howled like civilized youn