The Phantom of the River

by Edward Sylvester Ellis

"But they can never live beside each other!" exclaimed The Panther, with a deadlier flash of the eye; "the pale-faces are dogs; they steal the hunting grounds from the Indians; they rob and cheat them; they shoot our warriors and then call us brothers!"

No words can picture the scorn which the chieftain threw into these expressions. He flung his head back with an upward graceful swing of the arms, which added immense force to his declaration. It was an unconscious but a fine dramatic effect.

The chief difficulty in a "pow-wow" of this nature was that the balance of argument was invariably on the side of the Indian. The white men had invaded the hunting grounds of the aborigines. The French and Indian war was a prodigious struggle between the two rival nations of Europe as to which should own those hunting grounds; neither thought or cared for the rights of the red man; they had never done so.

The history of the settlement of this country, as has been said, is simply a history of violence, wrong, fraud, rapine, injustice, persecution, and crime on the part of the Caucasian against the American, relieved now and then, at remote periods, by such wise and beneficent acts as the Quaker treaty under the old tree at Shackamaxon, and stained with the hue of hell by such crimes as the massacre of the Moravian Indians, the capture of the Seminole chieftain Osceola under a flag of truce, the slaughter in later days of Colonel Chivington, and innumerable other instances of barbarity never surpassed by the most ferocious savages of the dark continent.

"Many of the pale-faces are evil," said the missionary. "The words of Wa-on-mon are true of a great number, I am sorry to say, but they are not true of all."

"They are true of all. They are true of the missionary."

The firelight showed a deeper flush that sprang to the face of the good man, who was not, and never could be, fully freed of much of the old Adam that lingered in his nature. His impulse was strong to smite the chieftain to the earth for his deadly insult, but Finley always held such promptings well in hand, and the duskier hue on each health-tinted cheek was the only evidence that his feelings had been stirred. His voice was as low and softly modulated as a woman's. He folded both arms over the muzzle of his rifle, whose stock rested on the leaves at his feet, and remained calmly confronting the savage chieftain, who more than once seemed ready to snatch out his knife and drive it into the heart of the man of God.

"The eyes of Wa-on-mon are not in the sunlight; the smoke is in them; when the sun drives away the smoke he will see the missionary as he saw him when they hunted the deer and buffalo and bear together, and when they helped the Wyandot, Kush-la-ka, to his wigwam."

This allusion was to an incident only a few months old. Kush-la-ka was almost mortally wounded in a death struggle with an immense bear, and would have perished had not The Panther and Finley looked after him and helped him to his own home.

The good man hoped the recall of the occurrence would stir a responsive chord in the heart of the chieftain, and open the way for uttering the prayer which he had not yet dared to hint; but the failure was absolute; the mood of The Panther was too sullen, too revengeful, too deeply stirred by the memory of recent wrongs for it to be amenable (as it occasionally had been) to gentle influences. He persisted in regarding the missionary as a presumptuous and execrated enemy.