Jack gave the particulars which the reader learned long ago, adding an account of the efforts made by Deerfoot and the Sauk to trace him, and of the despair all felt when they were told the captive had been left to die alone in the woods.
"I never expected to meet you again," said Jack, "and I couldn't understand why it was Deerfoot had any hope."
"'Cause he knowed," was the truthful remark.
"But what was the matter with you? You must have got well in a hurry."
Otto threw back his head and laughed in his old-fashioned, hearty style, adding:
"Do you dinks I vos very sick?"
And then the lad told his strange story, which perhaps you would prefer to hear in a little better accent than that of the narrator.
The statement made to Deerfoot by Lone Bear only a few hours before was shown to be accurate in every particular by the narrative of Otto himself, but it had a phase which neither Lone Bear nor any of his comrades suspected.
The Sauks who wandered away from their fellows, taking Otto along as their prisoner, met the Pawnees, who, as the reader well knows, were a long ways from home. Otto was bartered to them, and his captors continued toward their village, many days' journey to the north and west. They went at a moderate pace, stopping and hunting by the way and making themselves familiar with the country, with a view of removing their lodges thither, provided they could find a satisfactory place.
They were many hours on this dismal tramp when Otto asked himself whether it would not be as well to give up all thought of returning home, and of becoming one of the people into whose hands he had fallen. The hardship imposed by his parents impelled him to such a course, and, more than once, he decided not to make any effort to leave the Pawnees, even if a good opportunity offered. Had it not been for Jack Carleton and his kind mother he probably would have become an adopted Pawnee.