For a moment the girl stared at her brother with unbelieving eyes and colorless face. "Is it true?" she whispered at length. "Can it be true? Tell me, Louis, that you are not saying this thing to tease me, as you used when we were children. Tell me quick, brother, for I can bear the suspense no longer."
As Louis assured her that he had spoken only the truth, and that her lover still lived, the girl's over-strained feelings gave way, and she sank to the ground, sobbing, and panting for breath.
Louis Pacheco, clad in the costume of a Seminole warrior, battle worn, and travel stained, sat by his sister's side and soothed her into quietness. Then he told her the story of the great fight on the shore of Lake Okeechobee. He told how Coacoochee and three other chiefs, with less than five hundred warriors, fought for three hours in the saw-grass and tangled hammock growth, against eleven hundred white troops under General Zachary Taylor, and finally retired for want of ammunition, taking with them their thirteen dead and nineteen wounded. "The white soldiers were killed until they lay on the ground in heaps, and their wounded could not be counted. If we had only had plenty of powder, and as good guns as they, we would not have left one of them alive," concluded the narrator, fiercely.
"Oh, Louis, it is awful!" cried the girl, with a shudder.
"What is awful? That we left so many of them alive? Yes; so it is, but—"
"I do not mean that. I mean this terrible fighting."
"Yes, sister, the fighting is terrible, and so is the suffering; but neither is so terrible as tamely submitting to slavery, and injustice, and oppression, and the loss of everything you hold most dear on earth. Those are the terrible things that the whites are trying to force upon us. But we will never submit. We will fight, and cheerfully die, if needs be, as free men, rather than live as slaves. As for the white man's word, I will never trust it. Coacoochee trusted it, and it led him to a prison. Osceola trusted it, and it led him to death. Micanopy trusted it, and it led him into exile."
"But, Louis, some of the whites are honorable. The Boyds have treated me like an own sister, and, but for them, Coacoochee would not now be free."
"Yes," admitted Louis, with softened voice. "Coacoochee has told me of them, and with my life would I repay their kindness to you and to him. With them you are safe, and with them will I gladly leave my sister until such time as I can make a free home for her."
"Oh, Louis! Haven't you come for me? Can't I go with you?"