yed and torn. He held his gun in his right hand, the stock resting on
the ground, while he looked with a half-inquiring expression, as if
doubting the identity of the young Kentuckian who had come such a
distance to help restore him to his friends. But a second stare
satisfied both, and rushing toward each other, they shook hands, laughed
and cried for very joy, their expressions disjointed and only clear in
their evidence of the delight which overflowed in their hearts.

"Oh, I forgot!" exclaimed Jack, drawing Otto's hat from under his coat
and slapping it on the yellow crown of his friend; "here's something
which belongs to you."

"Vere did you got him?" asked Otto, taking it from his head and
inspecting it. "I never dinks I would sees him agin."

Jack gave the particulars which the reader learned long ago, adding an
account of the efforts made by Deerfoot and the Sauk to trace him, and
of the despair all felt when they were told the captive had been left to
die alone in the woods.

"I never expected to meet you again," said Jack, "and I couldn't
understand why it was Deerfoot had any hope."

"'Cause he _knowed_," was the truthful remark.

"But what was the matter with you? You must have got well in a hurry."

Otto threw back his head and laughed in his old-fashioned, hearty style,
adding:

"Do you dinks I vos _very_ sick?"

And then the lad told his strange story, which perhaps you would prefer
to hear in a little better accent than that of the narrator.

The statement made to Deerfoot by Lone Bear only a few hours before was
shown to be accurate in every particular by the narrative of Otto
himself, but it had a phase which neither Lone Bear nor any of his
comrades suspected.

The Sauks who wandered away from their fellows, taking Otto along as
their prisoner, met the Pawnees, who, as the reader well knows, were a
long ways from home. Otto was bartered to them, and his captors
continued toward their village, many days' journey to the north and
west. They went at a moderate pace, stopping and hunting by the way and
making themselves familiar with the country, with a view of removing
their lodges thither, provided they could find a satisfactory place.

They were many hours on this dismal tramp when Otto asked himself
whether it would not be as well to give up all thought of returning
home, and of becoming one of the people into whose hands he had fallen.
The hardship imposed by his parents impelled him to