g men at a
horse-race.

The sport was very keen, the contest being exceedingly close, for Wyejah
had long needed only one additional point to make him a winner, and when
Otasite had failed to score he had also failed. The swift motion, the
graceful agility, the smiling face of Otasite,--for it was a matter of
the extremest exaction in the Indian games that however strenuous the
exertion and tense the strain upon the nerves and grievous the
mischances of the sport, the utmost placidity of manner and temper must
be preserved throughout,--all appealed freshly to the trader, although
it was a long-accustomed sight.

"Many a man in Charlestown--a well-to-do man" (applying the commercial
standard of value)--"would be proud to have such a son," he muttered, a
trifle dismayed by the perverse incongruities of fate. "He would have
sent the boy to school. If there was money enough he would have sent him
to England to be educated--and none too good for him!"

The shadows of the two players, all foreshortened by the approach of
noontide, bobbed about in dwarfish caricature along the smooth sandy
stretch. The great chungke-pole, an obelisk forty feet high planted on a
low mound in the centre of the chungke-yard, and with a target at its
summit used for trials of skill in marksmanship, cast a diminished
simulacrum on the ground at its base scarcely larger than the
chungke-lances. Now and again these heavy projectiles flew through the
air, impelled with an incredible force and a skill so accurate that it
seemed impossible that both contestants should not excel. There was a
moment, however, when Otasite might have made the decisive point to
score eleven had not the chungke-stone slipped from the hand of Wyejah
as he cast it, falling only a few yards distant. Otasite's lance, flung
instantly, shot far beyond that missile, for which, had the stone been
properly thrown, he should have aimed. Wyejah, disconcerted and shaken
by the mischance, launching his lance at haphazard, almost mechanically,
struck by obvious accident the flying lance of his adversary, deflecting
its course--the decisive cast, for which he had striven so long in vain,
and which was now merely fortuitous.

The crowds of Indian gamblers, with much money and goods at hazard upon
the event, some, indeed, having staked the clothes upon their backs, the
rifles and powder for their winter hunt that should furnish them with
food, were at once in a clamor of discussion as to