“On wheels! A Hunsicker and a M’Duffy married to a man on wheels, and who has to slide on the banister when he wants to come downstairs! Why don’t you accept Mr. Smith at once? He is intact, I believe, with the exception of his scalp. This family seems to be haunted by men who are more or less in piecemeal.”
“I would rather die than marry Smith.”
“You might do it for your mother’s sake, so as to be near to her.”
“Near to her? What do you mean?”
“Why, I came in to tell you, my child, that I have accepted General Belcher’s hand. I shall marry him, and we shall probably spend our summers at his prospective country seat upon the Pottawatomie Reservation.”
“General Belcher!” exclaimed Pandora in disgust; “I never thought, mother, it would come to that!”
Then Pandora swept out of the room, with her handkerchief to her eyes, leaving the majestic Mrs. M’Duffy in a condition of some uncertainty as to her daughter’s theory respecting the degree of humiliation which had been reached in her contract with the General.
“But I know he is rich, and that he has a promise of an appointment as Minister to Peru, where he expects to speculate in bark,” said Mrs. M’Duffy to herself.
The Secretary of the Interior Department at that period was an especially capable officer. He obtained by some means a clue to the secret of the movement against the Pottawatomie Reservation, and he followed it industriously by means of his agents. Late in the month of October he had probed the matter to the bottom, and he gave it to the newspapers.
The entire conspiracy of General Belcher and Achilles Smith was exposed, and an indignant nation discovered that the costly struggle with the Pottawatomies had not even so slight a basis of justice on the part of the Government as a real injury done to Achilles Smith. It was ascertained that Smith had not been scalped at all. He had merely had his hair pulled at the Pottawatomie agency by a muscular squaw whom he was trying to cheat out of her fair allowance of rations.