Burl could
hardly have been more startling than that caused by this revelation.
Three huge backward strides he made, then motionless stood for many
moments, one foot a step behind the other, his hands uplifted and
outspread, his eyes wide open, staring fixedly with mingled amazement,
incredulity, and awe, at the lifeless body before him.

In his younger days, when the passion for martial glory burned strong
within him, the Fighting Nigger, as we have seen, had been in the habit,
when blowing his own trumpet, of running his warlike exploits into the
fabulous and impossible--not from any direct design of deceiving his
hearers, but merely that he might make his theme as interesting and
wonderful to them as it was to himself; but that the honor of meeting
and overcoming in battle so renowned a warrior as Tecumseh, of whom the
world in which he lived, the great wild West, was so full, should ever
have been his, seemed to Mish-mugwa more fabulous than even his own
fables, and to which all his other achievements, granting them to have
been as prodigious as he was wont to boast them, dwarf into
unmentionable insignificance in comparison. The reader must not fail to
bear in mind that, just here, we are viewing Tecumseh through the eyes
of Burlman Reynolds.

At length, having taken in the evidence of his sight, but as if still
needing that of his touch to set his doubts at rest and convince him
that what he saw there was in verity a bodily form, Burl stole
cautiously up again and softly laid his hand on the breast of the fallen
hero. No sooner had he done so than with a warm, tender rush came
thronging back into his memory all those recollections which, stretching
their bright train from that glorious first of June to that beautiful
Sabbath in the wilderness, he had ever viewed as being the happiest of
his life. But when, linked with these, came back to his mind the
thrilling events of yesterday, suddenly and to the surprise of all
present, excepting his young master, the huge creature, with that
liveliness of feeling peculiar to his race, burst into a blubbering
explosion of tender, pitying, grateful feeling, and cried like a child.

"Pore, pore Kumshy! De good Lord hab pity on yo' soul an' gib you a
mansion, ef it's only a wigwam, somewhar in his kingdom. You's a pore
heathen, we know, but shorely somewhar in his kingdom he'll make room
fur de like uf you." And with this simple oration over Tecumseh's body,
Big Black Burl t