“The children of the Dacotahs,” murmured Waupee, “are learned in the ways of the medicine. The hand of the pale-face is like the aspen-leaf in the breath of the storm, and her heart is faint as the dove.”
“But, will he live?”
“Life is the gift of the great Manitou.”
“Yes, yes; don’t trouble your pretty heart about it, beauty, he’ll soon be around again,” exclaimed Waltermyer, holding the wounded man in his powerful arms, and bearing him to the shade of the bushes, tenderly as a mother would have carried her first-born.
Waupee succeeded in stanching the blood, and then, from the neighboring woods, gathered healing herbs, and carefully bound them on the wound, while the white girl lifted Osse ’o’s head from the hard rocks, and pillowed it in her lap. Waltermyer departed for the woods, and after a long absence, returned, bringing with him pine-branches and curving strips of bark, sufficient to make a shelter, and these, in the hands of Waupee, soon were framed into an almost fairy-like bower. When Osse ’o fell asleep, in his fragrant shelter, Waltermyer sat smoking his pipe at the door of the lodge, silently at first, but, ere long, his restless spirit broke forth in words:
“Waal; I did the best I could for the Mormon.”
“You buried him, then?” asked Esther, solemnly.
“Yes, deep and well. I piled the stones up, so as to know the place again ef I ever should see any of his relations, and they wanted to find it.”
The Indian woman—the poor, brutally-abused und suddenly widowed wife—looked steadily at him with her large, black eyes, but said nothing. Waltermyer fully understood the look, and replied:
“Yes, yes, Waupee, I did the same for the Black Eagle. Perhaps neither of them would have done it for me; but I can’t help that. I made him a grave for your sake, and fixed it up, Dacotah fashion, down by the spring. I knew their customs, and thought every one of the tribe would like to add a stone to the pile when they passed; so I fixed it in just as handy a place as I could.”