“It looks more like a cloud, peeping above the skirt of the plain with the sunshine lighting its edges. It is the smoke of the heavens.”

“It is a hill of the earth, and on its top are the lodges of Pale-faces! Let the women of my brother wash their feet among the people of their own colour.”

“The eyes of a Pawnee are good, if he can see a white-skin so far.”

The Indian turned slowly towards the speaker, and after a pause of a moment he sternly demanded—

“Can my brother hunt?”

“Alas! I claim to be no better than a miserable trapper!”

“When the plain is covered with the buffaloes, can be see them?”

“No doubt, no doubt—it is far easier to see than to take a scampering bull.”

“And when the birds are flying from the cold, and the clouds are black with their feathers, can he see themtoo?”

“Ay, ay, it is not hard to find a duck, or a goose, when millions are darkening the heavens.”

“When the snow falls, and covers the lodges of the Long-knives, can the stranger see flakes in the air?”

“My eyes are none of the best now,” returned the old man a little resentfully, “but the time has been when I had a name for my sight!”

“The Red-skins find the Big-knives as easily as the strangers see the buffaloe, or the travelling birds, or the falling snow. Your warriors think the Master of Life has made the whole earth white. They are mistaken. They are pale, and it is their own faces that they see. Go! a Pawnee is not blind, that he need look long for your people!”

The warrior suddenly paused, and bent his face aside, like one who listened with all his faculties absorbed in the act. Then turning the head of his horse, he rode to the nearest angle of the thicket, and looked intently across the bleak prairie, in a direction opposite to the side on which the party stood. Returning slowly from this unaccountable, and to his observers, startling procedure, he riveted his eyes on Inez, and paced back and forth several times, with the air of one who maintained a warm struggle on some difficult point, in the recesses of his own thoughts. He had drawn the reins of his impatient steed, and was seemingly about to speak, when his head again sunk on his chest, and he resumed his former attitude of attention. Galloping like a deer, to the place of his former observations, he rode for a moment swiftly, in short and rapid circles, as if still uncertain of his course, and then darted away, like a bird that had been fluttering around its nest before it takes a distant flight. After scouring the plain for a minute, he was lost to the eye behind a swell of the land.

The hounds, who had also manifested great uneasiness for some time, followed him for a little distance, and then terminated their chase by seating themselves on the ground, and raising their usual low, whining, and warning howls.