 This could be effected only in one manner, the acquiescence of
the Sumach being indispensably necessary to a compromise of her right to be
revenged. With this view, then, the woman was next desired to advance, and to
look to her own interests; no agent being considered as efficient as the
principal, herself, in this negotiation. The Indian females, when girls, are
usually mild, and submissive, with musical tones, pleasant voices, and merry
laughs, but toil and suffering generally deprive them of most of these
advantages, by the time they have reached an age which the Sumach had long
before passed. To render their voices harsh, it would seem to require active,
malignant, passions, though, when excited, their screams can rise to a
sufficiently conspicuous degree of discordancy, to assert their claim to possess
this distinctive peculiarity of the sex. The Sumach was not altogether without
feminine attraction, however, and had so recently been deemed handsome in her
tribe, as not to have yet learned the full influence that time and exposure
produce on man, as well as on woman. By an arrangement of Rivenoak's, some of
the women around her, had been employing the time in endeavoring to persuade the
bereaved widow, that there was still a hope Deerslayer might be prevailed on to
enter her wigwam, in preference to entering the world of spirits, and this, too,
with a success that previous symptoms scarcely justified. All this was the
result of a resolution on the part of the chief to leave no proper means
unemployed, in order to get transferred to his own nation the greatest hunter
that was then thought to exist in all that region, as well as a husband for a
woman who he felt would be likely to be troublesome, were any of her claims to
the attention and care of the tribe overlooked.
    In conformity with this scheme, the Sumach had been secretly advised to
advance into the circle, and to make her appeal to the prisoner's sense of
justice, before the band had recourse to the last experiment. The woman, nothing
loth, consented, for there was some such attraction in becoming the wife of a
noted hunter, among the females of the tribes, as is experienced by the sex, in
more refined life, when they bestow their hands on the affluent. As the duties
of a mother were thought to be paramount to all other considerations, the widow
felt none of that embarrassment, in preferring her claims, to which even a
female fortune hunter among ourselves, might be liable. When she stood forth,
before the whole party
