"Will my son promise the Miko to be a good father to the Oconees?" said the old chief in a hollow voice, as they pulled out of range of the fire.
"A father and a brother," answered the Comanche. "But why does my father ask? He will dwell long and happily with his children."
"Will El Sol swear it by the Great Spirit?" repeated the old man, earnestly, but in a fainter voice.
"He will," replied the young chief.
"Will he swear to bury Tokeah and his father's bones in the grave of the warriors of the Comanches?"
"He will," said El Sol.
"So shall the white men not scoff at his ashes nor at those of his father," groaned the Miko. "But it is the will of the Great Spirit that Tokeah should not see the hunting-grounds of the Comanches; he is doomed to die in the land of the palefaces."
A rattling in his throat interrupted the old man; he murmured a few broken words in the ears of his Oconees, who broke out into a wild howl of lamentation. Still clasping to his breast the coffin containing his father's bones, he sank back in the boat in the agonies of death. El Sol raised him in his arms, but life had already fled. A bullet had struck him between the shoulders, and inflicted a mortal wound. In silent grief the young chief threw himself upon the corpse, and long after the boat had reached the opposite shore, he lay there, unmindful of all but his sorrow. Roused at length by the whispers of his companions, to a sense of the danger of longer delay, he laid the body across a horse, and himself mounting the same animal, took the road to the village of the Pawnees. There, upon the following day, to the wild and mournful music of the death-song, the little party made its sorrowful entrance.
At this point the narrative ceases. We turn the page, expecting at least another chapter, or some notice of Rosa's restoration to her father, and subsequent marriage with Hodges, which the previous portion of the novel certainly led us to anticipate. But our author, with his usual eccentric disregard of the established routine of romance writers, contents himself with a postscript, consisting of an advertisement extracted from the Opelousas county paper, and dated March 1816, announcing the marriage of the amiable and accomplished Miss Mary Copeland, daughter of the Honourable John Copeland, of James county, to Mr James Hodges, formerly of H.B.M. Navy, and now of Hodges' Seat in the same state. The reader is left to complete the denouement for himself, if he so pleases, and to conjecture that Rosa's father, a Mexican grandee, takes back his daughter to her native country, and that the incipient attachment between her and the young Englishman is mutually forgotten.
We here finally conclude our extracts from the already published work of our German American friend—extracts comprising, as we believe, the cream of the twenty volumes, or thereabouts, which he has given to the world. The incognito behind which this clever and original writer has so long shrouded himself, is at length abandoned; and to a new edition of his works, now in course of publication, stands prefixed the name of Charles Sealsfield.