“This is not what our priests tell US,” answered le Bourdon. “They tell us that the white man's God commands us to love all alike—to do GOOD to our enemies, to LOVE them that wish us HARM, and to treat all men as we would wish men to treat us.” Peter was a good deal surprised at this doctrine, and it was nearly a minute before he resumed the discourse. He had recently heard it several times, and it was slowly working its way into his mind.
“Such are our traditions, and such are our laws. Look at me. Fifty winters have tried to turn my hair white. Time can do that. The hair is the only part of an Injin that ever turns white; all the rest of him is red. That is his color. The game knows an Injin by his color. The tribes know him. Everything knows him by his color. He knows the things which the Great Spirit has given him, in the same way. He gets used to them, and they are his acquaintances. He does not like strange things. He does not like strangers. White men are strangers, and he does not like to see them on his hunting-ground. If they come singly, to kill a few buffaloes, or to look for honey, or to catch beaver, the Injins would not complain. They love to give of their abundance. The pale-faces do not come in this fashion. They do not come as guests; they come as masters. They come and they stay. Each year of my fifty have I heard of new tribes that have been driven by them toward the setting sun.
“Bourdon, for many seasons I have thought of this. I have tried to find a way to stop them. There is but one. That way must the Injins try, or give up their hunting-grounds to the strangers. No nation likes to give up its hunting-grounds. They come from the Manitou, and one day he may ask to have them back again. What could the red men say, if they let the pale-faces take them away? No; this we cannot do. We will first try the one thing that is to be done.”
“I believe I understand you, Peter,” observed le Bourdon, finding that his companion paused. “You mean war. War, in the Injin mode of redressing all wrongs; war against man, woman, and child!”
Peter nodded in acquiescence, fixing his glowing eyes on the bee-hunter's face, as if to read his soul.
“Am I to understand, then, that you and your friends, the chiefs and their followers, that I saw on Prairie Round, mean to begin with US, half-a-dozen whites, of whom two are women, who happen to be here in your power—that OUR scalps are to be the first taken?”
“First!—no, Bourdon. Peter's hand has taken a great many, years since. He has got a name for his deeds, and no longer dare go to the white men's forts. He does not look for Yankees, he looks for pale-faces. When he meets a pale-face on the prairies, or in the woods, he tries to get his scalp. This has he done for years, and many has he taken.”
“This is a bloody account you are giving of yourself, Peter, and I would rather you should not have told it. Some such account I have heard before; but living with you, and eating, and drinking, and sleeping, and travelling in your company, I had not only hoped, but begun to think, it was not true.”
“It is true. My wish is to cut off the pale-faces. This must be done, or the pale-faces will cut off the Injins. There is no choice. One nation or the other must be destroyed. I am a red man; my heart tells me that the pale-faces should die. They are on strange hunting-grounds, not the red men. They are wrong, we are right. But, Bourdon, I have friends among the pale-faces, and it is not natural to scalp our friends. I do not understand a religion that tells us to love our enemies, and to do good to them that do harm to us—it is a strange religion. I am a poor Injin, and do not know what to think! I shall not believe that any do this, till I see it. I understand that we ought to love our friends. Your squaw is my daughter. I have called her daughter—she knows it, and my tongue is not forked, like a snake's. What it says, I mean. Once I meant to scalp your young squaw, because she was a pale-face squaw, and might be the mother of more. Now I do not mean to scalp her; my hand shall never harm her. My wisdom shall tell her to escape from the hands of red men who seek her scalp. You, too; now you are her husband, and are a great medicine-man of the bees, my hand shall not hurt you, either. Open your ears wide, for big truths must go into them.”
Peter then related in full his attempt to procure a safe passage for le Bourdon and Margery into the settlements, and its total failure. He owned that by his previous combinations he had awakened a spirit among the Indians that his present efforts could not quell. In a word, he told the whole story as it must have been made apparent to the reader, and he now came with his plans to defeat the very schemes that he had himself previously projected. One thing, however, that he did not conceal, filled the mind of his listener with horror, and created so strong an aversion to acting in concert with one who could even allude to it so coolly, that there was danger of breaking off all communications between the parties, and placing the result purely on force; a course that must have proved totally destructive to all the whites. The difficulty arose from a naive confession of Peter's, that he did not even wish to save any but le Bourdon and Margery, and that he still desired the deaths of all the others, himself!