“He wishes us to make peace with the Omahas. The United States would go with us to the Omahas, but we told them we were afraid. We are poor and weak and the Omahas would kill us.”
“Good,” approved We-ah-rush-hah.
“There are two of the white chiefs,” added We-the-a, or Hospitable One, the Missouri chief. “They wear long knives by their sides. Their hair is of strange color. The hair of one is yellow like ripe corn; the hair of the other is red as pipe-stone. The Red Head is big and pleasant; the yellow-haired one is slim and very straight, and when he speaks he does not smile. Yes, the Red Head is a buffalo, but the other is an elk.”
“They have three boats,” added Shos-gus-can, or White Horse, who was an Oto. “One boat is larger than any boat of any trader. It has a gun that talks in thunder. Of the other boats, one is painted white, one is painted red. The chiefs are dressed in long blue shirts that glitter with shining metal. The party are strong in arms. They have much guns, and powder and lead, and much medicine. They have a gun that shoots with air, and shoots many times. It is great medicine. They have a man all black like a buffalo in fall, with very white teeth and short black hair, curly like a buffalo’s. He is great medicine. They carry a white flag with blue and red borders. Red, white and blue are their medicine colors. The flag is their peace sign. There are French with them, from below, and another, a trader from the Sioux. They received us under a white lodge, and have named the place the Council-bluffs. They must be of a great nation.”
“I will go and see these United States, and talk with them,” announced Little Thief, majestically. “Their presents have been good, their words sound good. It is unwise to refuse gifts laid upon the prairie. If indeed we have a new father for all the Indians, maybe by listening to his chiefs we can get more from him than we did from our Spanish father. I will go and talk, at the burnt Omaha village. Let the four white men who have come with gifts and a message, seeking brothers-who-have-run-away, be well treated, so that we shall be well treated also.”
Then the council broke up.
On the outskirts, a boy, Little White Osage, had listened with all his ears. The affair was very interesting. A hot desire filled his heart to go, himself, and see these United States warriors, with their painted boats and their marvelous guns and their black medicine-man and their two chiefs whose hair was different, like his own hair.
His own hair was brown and fine instead of being black and coarse, and his eyes were blue instead of black, and his skin, even in its tan, was light instead of dark. Sometimes he was puzzled to remember just how he had come among the Otoes. He did not always feel like an Indian. To be sure, he had been bought from the Osages by the Otoes; but away, ’way back there had been a woman, a light-haired, soft-skinned woman, among the Osages, who had kissed him and hugged him and had taught him a language that he well-nigh had forgotten.
Occasionally one of those strange words rose to his lips, but he rarely used it, because the Osages, and now the Otoes, did not wish him to use it.
The Otoes called him Little White Osage, as a kind of slur. Nobody kissed him and hugged him, but in their ill-natured moments the Oto squaws beat him, and the children teased him. The squaws never beat the other boys. Antoine, the French trader, was kinder to him. But Antoine had married an Oto woman, and all his children were dark and Indian.