There was something of romance even in Benee. As he stood with folded arms on the brink of a cliff, and gazed downward into a charming glen, something very like tears stood in his eyes.
He loved his country. It was his own, his native land. But the savages therein he had ceased to love. Because when but a boy--ah, how well he remembered that day,--he was sent one day by his father and mother to gather the berries of a deadly kind of thorn-bush, with the juice of which the flints in the points of the arrows were poisoned. Coming back to his parents' hut in the evening, as happy as boys only can be, he found the place in flames, and saw his father, mother, and a sister whom he loved, being hurried away by the savages, because the queen had need of them. The lot of death had fallen on them. Their flesh was wanted to make part of a great feast her majesty was about to give to a neighbouring potentate. Benee, who had ever been used to hunt for his food as a boy, or fish in the lakes and the brown roaring streams, that he and his parents might live, had always abhorred human sacrifice and human flesh. The latter he had seldom been prevailed upon even to taste.
So from that terrible day he resolved to be a wanderer, and he registered a vow--if I may speak so concerning the thoughts of a poor boy-Indian--to take revenge when he became a man on this very tribe that had brought such grief and woe on him and his.
Benee was still a young man, but little over two-and-twenty, and as he stood there thoughts came into his mind about a little sweetheart he had when a boy.
Wee Weenah was she called; only a child of six when he was good sixteen. But in all his adventures, in forest or by the streams, Weenah used to accompany him. They used to be away together all day long, and lived on the nuts and the wild fruit that grew everywhere so plentifully about them, on trees, on bushes, or on the flowery banks.
Where was Weenah now? Dead, perhaps, or taken away to the queen's blood-stained court. As a child Weenah was very beautiful, for many of these Indians are very far indeed from being repulsive.
And Benee used to delight to dress his tiny lady-love in feathers of the wild birds, crimson and green and blue, and weave her rude garlands of the gaudiest flowers, to hang around her neck, or entwine in her long dark hair.
He had gone to see Weenah--though he was then in grief and tears--after he had left his father's burnt shealing. He had told her that he was going away far to the north, that he was to become a hunter of the wilds, that he might even visit the homes of the white men, but that some day he would return and Weenah should be his wife.
So they had parted thus, in childish grief and tears, and he had never seen her since.
He might see her nevermore.