bolder, but less active spirit of Ishmael was
far from great, and had not the latter been suddenly expelled from a fertile
bottom of which he had taken possession with intent to keep it, without much
deference to the forms of law, he would never have succeeded in enlisting the
husband of his sister, in an enterprise that required so much decision and
forethought. Their original success and subsequent disappointment have been
seen, and Abiram now sat apart, plotting the means by which he might secure to
himself the advantages of his undertaking, which he perceived were each moment
becoming more uncertain, through the open admiration of Mahtoree, for the
innocent subject of his villainy. We shall leave him to his vacillating and
confused expedients in order to pass to the description of certain other
personages in the drama.
    There was still another corner of the picture that was occupied. On a little
bank, at the extreme right of the encampment, lay the forms of Middleton and
Paul. Their limbs were painfully bound with thongs, cut from the skin of a
bison, while by a sort of refinement in cruelty, they were so placed that each
could see a reflection of his own misery in that of his neighbor. Within a dozen
yards of them, a post was set firmly in the ground, and against it was bound the
light and Apollo-like person of Hard-Heart. Between the two stood the trapper,
deprived of his rifle, his pouch and his horn, but otherwise left in a sort of
contemptuous liberty. Some five or six young warriors however with quivers at
their backs and long tough bows dangling from their shoulders, who stood with
grave watchfullness at no great distance from the spot, sufficiently proclaimed
how fruitless any attempt to escape on the part of one so aged and so feeble
might prove. Unlike the other spectators of the important conference, these
individuals were engaged in a discourse, that for them contained an interest of
its own.
    »Captain,« said the bee-hunter, with an expression of comical concern that
no misfortune could repress in one of his buoyant feelings, »do you really find
that accursed strap of untanned leather cutting into your shoulder, or is it
only the tickling in my own arm, that I feel?«
    »When the spirit suffers so deeply, the body is insensible to pain,«
returned the more refined, though scarcely so spirited Middleton, »would to
Heaven that some of my trusty artillerists might fall upon this accursed
encampment!«
    »You might as well wish that these Teton lodges were so many hives of
hornets, and that the insects would