"'Give me back my heart!'"
"Have you learned the lesson?"
CHAPTER XXII.
THE INDIAN PLOT.
One sultry August night a party of Sac and Fox Indians were encamped in a grove of oaks opposite Rock Island, on the western side of the Mississippi. Among them were Main-Pogue and Waubeno.
The encampment commanded a view of the burial hills and bluffs of the abandoned Sac village.
As the shadow of night stole over the warm, glimmering twilight, and the stars came out, the lights in the settlers' cabins began to shine; and as the Indians saw them one by one, their old resentment against the settlers rose and bitter words passed, and an old warrior stood up to rehearse his memories of the injustice that his race had suffered in the old treaties and the late war.
"Look," he said, "at the eyes of the cabins that gleam from yonder shore. The waters roll dark under them, but the lights of the canoes no more haunt the rapids, and the women and children may no more sit down by the graves of the braves of old. Our lights have gone out; their lights shine. Their lights shine on the bluffs, and they twinkle like fireflies along the prairies, and climb the cliffs in what was once the Red Man's Paradise. Like the fireflies to the night the white settlers came.