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 Doctor 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 characterize
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 roam'd, 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