His savage nature had mapped out the path he was to follow, and no meddling fancies were allowed to intrude upon him. A double purpose he had in view—gain, and the gratification of his own selfish purposes. The tenets of his savage religion offered no bar to their accomplishment, and he knew quite as little of conscience as his employer.
An hour later, and just as the sun was lighting the fleecy clouds, and all nature sung its first song of praise for the coming day, Black Eagle emerged from the forest, many miles distant, and entered the camp of his followers.
CHAPTER IV.
CLAUDE AND ELLEN.
The great West has its villas and palaces now crowding out the log-cabins of thirty years ago. You find them sheltered superbly by the ancient forest-trees, and surrounded by velvet lawns, through which the wild prairie-flowers will peep out and make an effort at their old free blossoming, but only to be uprooted for the hot-house roses and fuchsias of other climes.
In one of these luxurious dwellings lived the La Clides, the most refined and wealthy family to be found in the neighborhood of St. Louis. The owner, a young man, not yet four and twenty, and his mother, one of the most beautiful women of her time, occupied this noble dwelling, and the vast wealth which had been left to their control was day by day expended in making it still more beautiful.
Claude La Clide’s grandfather had been a French fur-trader, when western enterprise of this kind yielded enormous profits. Like many of his class, he married among the Indians, choosing for his forest-bride a daughter of the Dacotahs, as the tribe loved to call itself, or more commonly in their savage relations, Ochente Shacoan—the nation of the Seven Council Fires—though by the white traders they were designated as Sioux.
The fur-trader soon accumulated a fortune in his profitable traffic, and having buried his Indian wife in the forest, took his only child, a daughter, back to St. Louis to be educated.
There La Clide invested his money in real estate, which rapidly rose in value, and, almost without an effort or a wish, he became one of the richest men of the West. While his daughter was in her first youth, the fur-trader died, leaving her his great wealth in direct possession.
Two years after her father’s death, a young French gentleman, impoverished and exiled for his participation in one of those revolutions which are constantly scattering the old families of France into strange lands, came to St. Louis. He was a man of peculiar refinement, handsome and modest as refined men usually are. He met the young heiress. Her beauty, the shy, wild grace inherited from her mother, softened and toned down by education, fascinated him at once. She was something so fresh, so unlike the females of his own world, that her very presence was full of romance to the young exile. She loved him and they were married.
La Clide brought all his taste and knowledge of architecture into action, when a new home for his bride was built near the town, and yet removed from its bustle and crowds. It commanded a fine view of the monarch river, whose eternal flow could be heard from the veranda and balconies when the day was quiet. Its stone walls were soon draped with the choicest climbing plants. Passion flowers twined in and out through the stone carvings of the balconies, roses curtained the windows. Great forest-trees waved their branches over the roof, and clothed the distant grounds, and above all, love reigned within—that quiet, deep love for which a man or woman is so grateful to God that it breaks forth in thanksgiving with every smile and word.