All, excepting Red Hatchet, were really startled by the tidings that there was a captive in camp, and one who was the daughter of a man who had ever been the friend of the redskins.
When the information had been given that a chief had brought her, then Two Strike demanded that the guilty one declare himself at once.
Then Red Hatchet arose in his majesty, and said that he it was who had brought the captive there, and placed her in the keeping of his mother.
He said that she had been sent there by her people, to prevent her from running away with their worst foe, the white captain, the War Eagle, who was like a hound on the track of the Sioux.
He asserted that the settler had shown his trust in his red friends, his love for his redskin brother, himself, by giving his daughter to his keeping, and that he preferred she should become the wife of a Sioux chief, rather than that of the pale-face soldier, their untiring enemy.
The words of Red Hatchet made a decided impression, and he was not slow in discovering it, so went on to say that as the captive was there, if the chiefs thought best, she would be given into the keeping of Sun Gazer, the medicine chief, to hold until they should utterly crush their pale-face foes, when she was, as his, Red Hatchet's wife, to become an adopted daughter of their tribe.
This the chief agreed to, and so it was that Kit Carey's plot met with success thus far, as Jennie Woodbridge was taken to the tepee of the medicine chief, where no warrior dare enter under penalty of death.
But it so happened that Kit Carey had his eyes open to what was going on, and he saw the captive taken there by Two Strike and Little Wound, and as old Sun Gazer was asleep, he, Moon Eyes, was bidden to guard her securely, which he most faithfully promised to do.
Poor Jennie did not understand this change, from the care of the Chief Red Hatchet's mother, to that of the medicine man, and was dreading some terrible fate, when the flap of the tepee was raised, and she heard a voice say in a whisper:
"Do not distress yourself, Miss Bernard, for you have one near to serve you."