"Red Snake! Was Red Snake here? How do you know? What was he doing? Were there other Indians with him?"
Pashepaho shrugged his shoulders.
"Me know he come. Me come. He scare. He run 'way. He no come more. Think heap much Pawnee here."
He chuckled to himself, but Joshua Peniman did not join in his merriment. He knew now that a deadly enemy was following them, and that while Nina Carroll was in their hands there could be neither rest nor security for the family.
They rose early, and taking a grateful farewell of Pashepaho started on their way.
In the fresh light of early morning, they caught their first glimpse of Nebraska.
The land all about them lay smiling, with tall prairie grass waving to and fro and flickering with constantly changing shades and colors, the river glinted like a sheet of silver, and over all arched the sky, blue as an amethyst, with the delicate shades of early sunrise coloring the east.
They crossed the Missouri on the ferry-boat General Marion, which had been running only since the spring of the year before, and found themselves in Omaha, taking their first view of the bare, straggling settlement which is now the chief city of the great agricultural State of Nebraska.
At that time Omaha was the centre of the reservation of the Maha, or Omaha, tribe, and a trading post for the trappers and traders who had come to profit by the credulity and ignorance of the Indians. Missionaries were here who had come to carry Christianity into the wilderness, and a few white settlers who at that date had found their way across the river into the newly organized territory. The great motionless prairies lay spread out in striking contrast to the uplands and valleys along the river, with the sombre brown of the vegetation lighted up by the sunrise through a soft haze that cast a glamour over the picture.
The Omahas were camped in their teepees on the lowlands, bucks, squaws, papooses, dogs, wigwams and ponies huddled together, just as they had come from their great annual hunt in the Elkhorn valley, where elk, bison, antelope and other game abounded. There were a few shanties and log huts scattered about, but at this date, August of 1856, there were not more than fifty white families in the whole of Douglas County.