Trembling with agitation I responded.
What immediately followed I am unable to recall. Indeed, I doubt whether at the time I was thoroughly conscious of it.
When I undoubtedly had fully recovered my presence of mind, I found that matters had completely changed for me. The death at the stake, which had seemed to be my destiny, had faded from my senses. The red devils almost seemed to have been transmuted into copper-colored angels. I was seated on a buffalo-robe, and some of the elder squaws were bathing my swollen limbs with cooling lotions, and looking—gratitude was almost compelling me to say what literal truth cannot. They certainly did not look in any wise amiable or handsome.
While this was going on, a tall and splendidly formed specimen of the red man entered the hut. He was dressed in a robe or tunic, magnificently embroidered with shells and beads. He had evidently been sent for by the chief, as I soon discovered, because he was able to speak English. The only blemish in his personal appearance was a sort of dip in his right eyebrow, which partially closed the organ beneath. White superstition might possibly have gifted him with the evil eye. The Indian name he bore somewhat corresponded with this, as he was called Par-a-wau, or "The Warning Devil."
First, addressing the chief (I afterwards found this was Old Spotted Tail) in their own tongue, he received an answer.
Then turning to me, he extended his hand and gave me the Masonic grip. After this, he seated himself beside me, and addressed me in my own tongue, asking how I came upon the hunting-grounds of the Cheyennes, where I was from, and whither I was going? When he had received my answers and repeated them to the chief in the tongue of their tribe, he next began to inquire very minutely about Masonry among the palefaces. In subsequent conversations with him, for in the present case I had only to reply, I found that the Indians had first been initiated in its mysteries by the agents of the Hudson Bay Company. Neither had it been much carried beyond the northern and western tribes. This was learnt from Par-a-wau, when I began to feel perfectly at ease with him.
At this time I was merely a captive, although I had, from the mere chance of Old Spotted Tail's appreciation of my personal appearance, escaped the risk of no longer being one, by the most speedy means of escape from life my red acquaintances could have devised for me, consistently with their own amusement. Be it remembered, in stating this fact, individual vanity bears no part—the Indian idea of comeliness being very much the reverse, in general, of the white man's idea of that desirable qualification.
After his examination of me had been brought to an end, he made an oration of some length to the aged Cheyenne chief. He had risen to his feet as he did so, and the grace of his movements, with his full and rollingly sonorous voice, might have done credit to the best of our own orators. Indeed, so completely did his gesture translate his speech, that I could almost follow every word of the appeal he was making for me. He was evidently pleading for my pardon. This I feel I should have received, if I am sufficiently a judge of human features to have translated the benign savageness of Old Spotted Tail's countenance. But there are always two sides to a question, and the young chief, who had appropriated not only myself but my gelding, Charlie, now put in for a long talk. I could swear he was not half as eloquent as Par-a-wau. However, what he said in a harsh voice, and with a large amount of what might be called temperate wrath, settled the question in discussion. The elders of the tribe gave him, twice or thrice, that discordant grunt of acquiescence which Fenimore Cooper, the modern writer, has translated more musically as—
"Ugh!"
Consequently Old Spotted Tail pronounced a few words, and my red lawyer—so I began to consider Warning Devil, although I had been unable to fee him—turning to me, said in English: