The priest spoke carefully.
"We always counsel peace. You know we do not belong to either faction."
His smile was irresistible, and the most partisan of us could not dislike him that he spoke for neither North nor South.
"But," Tell persisted, "how do the Injuns themselves feel?"
Tell seemed to have lost his usual insight, else he could have seen that quick, shrewd, penetrating glance of the good Father's reading him through and through.
"I have just come from the Mission," he said. "The Osages are always loyal to the Union. The Verdigris River was too high for me to hear from the villages in the southwest."
Tell was listening eagerly. So also were the two strangers who stood in the doorway now. If the priest noted this he gave no sign. Mr. Dodd spoke here for the first time.
"Well," he said in his pious intonation, "if the Osages are loyal, that clears Jean here. He's an Osage, isn't he?"
Jean made no reply; neither did Le Claire, and Tell Mapleson turned casually to the strangers, engaging them in conversation.
"We shall want our horses at four sharp in the morning," one of the two came out to say to Cam. "We have a long hard day before us."