were occasionally gleaming through
the reserved manner of this warrior, that he knew the strange people, who were
thus trespassing on his native rights, much more by report than by any actual
intercourse. This personal ignorance of the whites, was as much betrayed by the
manner in which he regarded the females, as by the brief, but energetick,
expressions which, occasionally escaped him.
    While speaking to the trapper he suffered his wandering glances, to stray
towards the intellectual and nearly infantile beauty of Inez, as one might be
supposed to gaze upon the loveliness of an ethereal being. It was very evident
that he now saw, for the first time, one of those females, of whom the fathers
of his tribe so often spoke, and who were considered of such rare excellence as
to equal all that savage ingenuity could imagine in the way of loveliness. His
observation of Ellen was less marked, but, notwithstanding the warlike and
chastened expression of his eye, there was much of the homage which man is wont
to pay to woman, even in the more cursory look he sometimes turned on her
maturer and perhaps more animated beauty. This admiration, however, was so
tempered by his habits and so smothered in the pride of a warrior, as completely
to elude every eye but that of the trapper, who was too well skilled in Indian
customs and was too well instructed in the importance of rightly conceiving the
character of the stranger to let the smallest trait, or the most trifling of his
movements escape him. In the mean time, the unconscious Ellen, herself, mov'd
about the feeble, and less resolute Inez, with her accustomed assiduity and
tenderness, exhibiting in her frank features those changing emotions of joy and
regret, which occasionally beset her, as her active mind dwelt on the decided
step she had just taken, with the contending doubts and hopes, and possibly with
some of the mental vacillation, that was natural to her situation and sex.
    Not so Paul; conceiving himself to have attained the two things dearest to
his heart, the possession of Ellen and a triumph over the sons of Ishmael, he,
now, enacted his part in the business of the moment, with as much coolness as
though he were already leading his willing bride from solemnizing their nuptials
before a border magistrate to the security of his own dwelling. He had hovered
around the moving family during the tedious period of their weary march,
concealing himself by day, and seeking interviews with his betrothed, as
opportunities offered, in the manner already described, until fortune and his
own intrepidity had united to render him successful