Then the old chief said to his second daughter, “Your sister has failed; it must be you that the great chief will marry.”
So the second daughter picked up the beaver curtain and flung it round her, and ran to the empty lodge; and, being crafty, she cried aloud as she came near, “Oh! What a handsome chief you are!”
“How do you know I am handsome?” said the voice. “Tell me what clothes I wear.”
So she guessed in her mind, and, looking on the painted lodge, she said, “A robe of buckskin, with wonderful animals painted on it.”
“Go home,” said the voice, “and learn to speak truth.”
Then she slunk away home, and squatted on the ground before the lodge, with her chin on her breast.
Now, when the youngest daughter saw that both her sisters had failed, she said to herself, “They tell me I am very thin and ugly, but I will go and try if I can see this great chief.” So she pushed aside a corner of the birch-bark, slipped out at the back of the lodge, and stole away to the painted lodge; and there, sitting by his fire on the ground, she saw a wonderful great chief, with skin as white as midwinter snow, dressed in a long robe of red and blue and green and yellow stripes.
He smiled on her as she stood humbly before him, and said, “Tell me now, chief’s daughter, what I am like, and what I wear!”
And she said, “Your face is like a cloud in the north when the sun shines bright from the south; and your robe is like the arch in the sky when the sun shines on the rain.”
Then he stood up and took her for his wife, and carried her away to live in his own country.