The Prairie (38 page)

As the little speck of blue rose against the heavens, like an island
issuing from the deep, the savages occasionally raised a yell of
triumph. But the mists of evening were already gathering along the whole
of the eastern margin of the prairie, and before the band had made half
of the necessary distance, the dim outline of the rock had melted into
the haze of the back ground. Indifferent to this circumstance, which
rather favoured than disconcerted his plans, Mahtoree, who had again
ridden in front, held on his course with the accuracy of a hound of the
truest scent, merely slackening his speed a little, as the horses of his
party were by this time thoroughly blown. It was at this stage of the
enterprise, that the old man rode up to the side of Middleton, and
addressed him as follows in English—

"Here is likely to be a thieving business, and one in which I must say I
have but little wish to be a partner."

"What would you do? It would be fatal to trust ourselves in the hands of
the miscreants in our rear."

"Tut, for miscreants, be they red or be they white. Look ahead, lad,
as if ye were talking of our medicines, or perhaps praising the Teton
beasts. For the knaves love to hear their horses commended, the same as
a foolish mother in the settlements is fond of hearing the praises of
her wilful child. So; pat the animal and lay your hand on the gewgaws,
with which the Red-skins have ornamented his mane, giving your eye as
it were to one thing, and your mind to another. Listen; if matters are
managed with judgment, we may leave these Tetons as the night sets in."

"A blessed thought!" exclaimed Middleton, who retained a painful
remembrance of the look of admiration, with which Mahtoree had
contemplated the loveliness of Inez, as well as of his subsequent
presumption in daring to wish to take the office of her protector on
himself.

"Lord, Lord! what a weak creatur' is man, when the gifts of natur' are
smothered in bookish knowledge, and womanly manners! Such another start
would tell these imps at our elbows that we were plotting against them,
just as plainly as if it were whispered in their ears by a Sioux tongue.
Ay, ay, I know the devils; they look as innocent as so many frisky
fawns, but there is not one among them all that has not an eye on our
smallest motions. Therefore, what is to be done is to be done in wisdom,
in order to circumvent their cunning. That is right; pat his neck and
smile, as if you praised the horse, and keep the ear on my side open
to my words. Be careful not to worry your beast, for though but little
skilled in horses, reason teaches that breath is needful in a hard push,
and that a weary leg makes a dull race. Be ready to mind the signal,
when you hear a whine from old Hector. The first will be to make
ready; the second, to edge out of the crowd; and the third, to go—am I
understood?"

"Perfectly, perfectly," said Middleton, trembling in his excessive
eagerness to put the plan in instant execution, and pressing the
little arm, which encircled his body, to his heart. "Perfectly. Hasten,
hasten."

"Ay, the beast is no sloth," continued the trapper in the Teton
language, as if he continued the discourse, edging cautiously through
the dusky throng at the same time, until he found himself riding at the
side of Paul. He communicated his intentions in the same guarded manner
as before. The high-spirited and fearless bee-hunter received the
intelligence with delight, declaring his readiness to engage the whole
of the savage band, should it become necessary to effect their object.
When the old man drew off from the side of this pair also, he cast his
eyes about him to discover the situation occupied by the naturalist.

The Doctor, with infinite labour to himself and Asinus, had maintained a
position in the very centre of the Siouxes, so long as there existed the
smallest reason for believing that any of the missiles of Ishmael might
arrive in contact with his person. After this danger had diminished, or
rather disappeared entirely, his own courage revived, while that of his
steed began to droop. To this mutual but very material change was owing
the fact, that the rider and the ass were now to be sought among that
portion of the band who formed a sort of rear-guard. Hither, then, the
trapper contrived to turn his steed, without exciting the suspicions of
any of his subtle companions.

"Friend," commenced the old man, when he found himself in a situation
favourable to discourse, "should you like to pass a dozen years among
the savages with a shaved head, and a painted countenance, with,
perhaps, a couple of wives and five or six children of the half breed,
to call you father?"

"Impossible!" exclaimed the startled naturalist. "I am indisposed
to matrimony in general, and more especially to all admixture of the
varieties of species, which only tend to tarnish the beauty and to
interrupt the harmony of nature. Moreover, it is a painful innovation on
the order of all nomenclatures."

"Ay, ay, you have reason enough for your distaste to such a life; but
should these Siouxes get you fairly into their village, such would be
your luck, as certain as that the sun rises and sets at the pleasure of
the Lord."

"Marry me to a woman who is not adorned with the comeliness of the
species!" responded the Doctor. "Of what crime have I been guilty,
that so grievous a punishment should await the offence? To marry a man
against the movements of his will, is to do a violence to human nature!"

"Now, that you speak of natur', I have hopes that the gift of reason has
not altogether deserted your brain," returned the old man, with a covert
expression playing about the angles of his deep set eyes, which betrayed
he was not entirely destitute of humour. "Nay, they may conceive you a
remarkable subject for their kindness, and for that matter marry you
to five or six. I have known, in my days, favoured chiefs who had
numberless wives."

"But why should they meditate this vengeance?" demanded the Doctor,
whose hair began to rise, as if each fibre was possessed of sensibility;
"what evil have I done?"

"It is the fashion of their kindness. When they come to learn that you
are a great medicine, they will adopt you in the tribe, and some mighty
chief will give you his name, and perhaps his daughter, or it may be a
wife or two of his own, who have dwelt long in his lodge, and of whose
value he is a judge by experience."

"The Governor and Founder of natural harmony protect me!" ejaculated the
Doctor. "I have no affinity to a single consort, much less to duplicates
and triplicates of the class! I shall certainly essay a flight from
their abodes before I mingle in so violent a conjunction."

"There is reason in your words; but why not attempt the race you speak
of now?"

The naturalist looked fearfully around, as if he had an inclination to
make an instant exhibition of his desperate intention; but the dusky
figures, who were riding on every side of him, seemed suddenly tripled
in number, and the darkness, that was already thickening on the prairie,
appeared in his eyes to possess the glare of high noon.

"It would be premature, and reason forbids it," he answered. "Leave me,
venerable venator, to the council of my own thoughts, and when my plans
are properly classed, I will advise you of my resolutions."

"Resolutions!" repeated the old man, shaking his head a little
contemptuously as he gave the rein to his horse, and allowed him to
mingle with the steeds of the savages. "Resolution is a word that is
talked of in the settlements, and felt on the borders. Does my brother
know the beast on which the Pale-face rides?" he continued, addressing
a gloomy looking warrior in his own tongue, and making a motion with his
arm that at the same time directed his attention to the naturalist and
the meek Asinus.

The Teton turned his eyes for a minute on the animal, but disdained to
manifest the smallest portion of that wonder he had felt, in common with
all his companions, on first viewing so rare a quadruped. The trapper
was not ignorant, that while asses and mules were beginning to be known
to those tribes who dwelt nearest the Mexicos, they were not usually
encountered so far north as the waters of La Platte. He therefore
managed to read the mute astonishment, that lay so deeply concealed in
the tawny visage of the savage, and took his measures accordingly.

"Does my brother think that the rider is a warrior of the Pale-faces?"
he demanded, when he believed that sufficient time had elapsed, for a
full examination of the pacific mien of the naturalist.

The flash of scorn, which shot across the features of the Teton, was
visible, even by the dim light of the stars.

"Is a Dahcotah a fool?" was the answer.

"They are a wise nation, whose eyes are never shut; much do I wonder,
that they have not seen the great medicine of the Big-knives!"

"Wagh!" exclaimed his companion, suffering the whole of his amazement to
burst out of his dark rigid countenance at the surprise, like a flash of
lightning illuminating the gloom of midnight.

"The Dahcotah knows that my tongue is not forked. Let him open his eyes
wider. Does he not see a very great medicine?"

The light was not necessary to recall to the savage each feature in the
really remarkable costume and equipage of Dr. Battius. In common with
the rest of the band, and in conformity with the universal practice
of the Indians, this warrior, while he had suffered no gaze of
idle curiosity to disgrace his manhood, had not permitted a single
distinctive mark, which might characterise any one of the strangers, to
escape his vigilance. He knew the air, the stature, the dress, and the
features, even to the colour of the eyes and of the hair, of every one
of the Big-knives, whom he had thus strangely encountered, and deeply
had he ruminated on the causes, which could have led a party, so
singularly constituted, into the haunts of the rude inhabitants of his
native wastes. He had already considered the several physical powers
of the whole party, and had duly compared their abilities with what he
supposed might have been their intentions. Warriors they were not, for
the Big-knives, like the Siouxes, left their women in their villages
when they went out on the bloody path. The same objections applied to
them as hunters, and even as traders, the two characters under which the
white men commonly appeared in their villages. He had heard of a
great council, at which the Menahashah, or Long-knives, and the
Washsheomantiqua, or Spaniards, had smoked together, when the latter
had sold to the former their incomprehensible rights over those vast
regions, through which his nation had roamed, in freedom, for so many
ages. His simple mind had not been able to embrace the reasons why one
people should thus assume a superiority over the possessions of another,
and it will readily be perceived, that at the hint just received from
the trapper, he was not indisposed to fancy that some of the hidden
subtilty of that magical influence, of which he was so firm a believer,
was about to be practised by the unsuspecting subject of their
conversation, in furtherance of these mysterious claims. Abandoning,
therefore, all the reserve and dignity of his manner, under the
conscious helplessness of ignorance, he turned to the old man, and
stretching forth his arms, as if to denote how much he lay at his mercy,
he said—

"Let my father look at me. I am a wild man of the prairies; my body
is naked; my hands empty; my skin red. I have struck the Pawnees, the
Konzas, the Omahaws, the Osages, and even the Long-knives. I am a man
amid warriors, but a woman among the conjurors. Let my father speak: the
ears of the Teton are open. He listens like a deer to the step of the
cougar."

"Such are the wise and uns'archable ways of One who alone knows good
from evil!" exclaimed the trapper, in English. "To some He grants
cunning, and on others He bestows the gift of manhood! It is humbling,
and it is afflicting to see so noble a creatur' as this, who has fou't
in many a bloody fray, truckling before his superstition like a beggar
asking for the bones you would throw to the dogs. The Lord will forgive
me for playing with the ignorance of the savage, for He knows I do it in
no mockery of his state, or in idle vaunting of my own; but in order to
save mortal life, and to give justice to the wronged, while I defeat the
deviltries of the wicked! Teton," speaking again in the language of the
listener, "I ask you, is not that a wonderful medicine? If the Dahcotahs
are wise, they will not breathe the air he breathes, nor touch his
robes. They know, that the Wahconshecheh (bad spirit) loves his own
children, and will not turn his back on him that does them harm."

The old man delivered this opinion in an ominous and sententious manner,
and then rode apart as if he had said enough. The result justified his
expectations. The warrior, to whom he had addressed himself, was
not slow to communicate his important knowledge to the rest of the
rear-guard, and, in a very few moments, the naturalist was the object of
general observation and reverence. The trapper, who understood that the
natives often worshipped, with a view to propitiate, the evil spirit,
awaited the workings of his artifice, with the coolness of one who had
not the smallest interest in its effects. It was not long before he saw
one dark figure after another, lashing his horse and galloping ahead
into the centre of the band, until Weucha alone remained nigh the
persons of himself and Obed. The very dulness of this grovelling-minded
savage, who continued gazing at the supposed conjuror with a sort of
stupid admiration, opposed now the only obstacle to the complete success
of his artifice.

Thoroughly understanding the character of this Indian, the old man lost
no time in getting rid of him also. Riding to his side he said, in an
affected whisper—

"Has Weucha drunk of the milk of the Big-knives, to-day?"