In his younger days, when the passion for martial glory burned strong within him, the Fighting Nigger, as we have seen, had been in the habit, when blowing his own trumpet, of running his warlike exploits into the fabulous and impossible—not from any direct design of deceiving his hearers, but merely that he might make his theme as interesting and wonderful to them as it was to himself; but that the honor of meeting and overcoming in battle so renowned a warrior as Tecumseh, of whom the world in which he lived, the great wild West, was so full, should ever have been his, seemed to Mish-mugwa more fabulous than even his own fables, and to which all his other achievements, granting them to have been as prodigious as he was wont to boast them, dwarf into unmentionable insignificance in comparison. The reader must not fail to bear in mind that, just here, we are viewing Tecumseh through the eyes of Burlman Reynolds.
At length, having taken in the evidence of his sight, but as if still needing that of his touch to set his doubts at rest and convince him that what he saw there was in verity a bodily form, Burl stole cautiously up again and softly laid his hand on the breast of the fallen hero. No sooner had he done so than with a warm, tender rush came thronging back into his memory all those recollections which, stretching their bright train from that glorious first of June to that beautiful Sabbath in the wilderness, he had ever viewed as being the happiest of his life. But when, linked with these, came back to his mind the thrilling events of yesterday, suddenly and to the surprise of all present, excepting his young master, the huge creature, with that liveliness of feeling peculiar to his race, burst into a blubbering explosion of tender, pitying, grateful feeling, and cried like a child.
"Pore, pore Kumshy! De good Lord hab pity on yo' soul an' gib you a mansion, ef it's only a wigwam, somewhar in his kingdom. You's a pore heathen, we know, but shorely somewhar in his kingdom he'll make room fur de like uf you." And with this simple oration over Tecumseh's body, Big Black Burl turned weeping away and followed his sorrowing master from the field, the stoniness and blindness of Calvinism gone from his creed forever.
That night, long after the somber autumn sun had set, and the somber autumn moon had risen, and the victorious foe had laid him down to sleep in his distant tent, silent as the shadows through which they glided, they returned to the battle-ground, the red warriors of the wilderness, to pay the last tribute of respect to their fallen chieftain. Beside a fallen oak that lay along the verge of the marsh—there, on the spot where he had made his last stand for the wild people, the wild land, the wild independence he had loved more than his life—they dug a grave, and in it laid the mortal remains of the immortal Tecumseh. Then they went their way, their wild hearts breaking with grief and despair, and he was left to that solitude of silence and shadow which, like a hallowing spell inspiring reverence and awe in the minds of the living, ever lingers round the resting-places of the illustrious dead. But for many a year thereafter they made it their wont to return thither, as on pilgrimage to a holy shrine, once more to look with reverent eyes on the green mound where he lay, and with reverent hands keep back the willows and wild roses growing too thick around it, that, unshadowed, it might be ever open to the loving, pitying light of the setting sun.
Thus he died, this Indian Hannibal; thus he set, this Glory of his Race. Let him sleep! Wahcoudah's will be done! Rule, great Wahcoudah!
The End.