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By Root 1335 0

musical tones, pleasant voices, and merry laughs; but toil and suffering generally deprive them of most of these advantages by the time they have reached an age which the Sumach had long before passed. To render their voices harsh, it would seem to require active, malignant passions, though, when excited, their screams can rise to a sufficiently conspicuous degree of discordancy to assert their claim to possess this distinctive peculiarity of the sex. The Sumach was not altogether without feminine attraction, however, and had so recently been deemed handsome in her tribe, as not to have yet learned the full influence that time and exposure produce on man as well as on woman. By an arrangement of Rivenoak’s, some of the women around her had been employing the time in endeavoring to persuade the bereaved widow that there was still a hope Deerslayer might be prevailed on to enter her wigwam, in preference to entering the world of spirits, and this, too, with a success that previous symptoms scarcely justified. All this was the result of a resolution on the part of the chief to leave no proper means unemployed, in order to get the greatest hunter that was then thought to exist in all that region, transferred to his own nation, as well as a husband for a woman who he felt would be likely to be troublesome, were any of her claims to the attention and care of the tribe overlooked.

In conformity with this scheme the Sumach had been secretly advised to advance into the circle, and to make her appeal to the prisoner’s sense of justice before the band had recourse to the last experiment. The woman, nothing loath, consented; for there was some such attraction in becoming the wife of a noted hunter, among the females of the tribes, as is experienced by the sex in more refined life when they bestow their hands on the affluent. As the duties of a mother were thought to be paramount to all other considerations, the widow felt none of that embarrassment in preferring her claims, to which even a female fortunehunter among ourselves might be liable. When she stood forth before the whole party, therefore, the children that she led by the hand fully justified all she did.

“You see me before you, cruel paleface,” the woman commenced ; “your spirit must tell you my errand. I have found you; I cannot find Le Loup Cervier, nor the Panther; I have looked for them in the lake, in the woods, in the clouds. I cannot say where they have gone.”

“No man knows, good Sumach, no man knows,” interposed the captive. “When the spirit leaves the body it passes into a world beyond our knowledge, and the wisest way for them that are left behind is to hope for the best. No doubt both your warriors have gone to the happy hunting-grounds, and at the proper time you will see ‘em ag’in in their improved state. The wife and sister of braves must have looked forward to some such tarmination of their ’arthly careers.”

“Cruel paleface, what had my warriors done that you should slay them? They were the best hunters and the boldest young men of their tribe; the Great Spirit intended that they should live until they withered like the branches of the hemlock, and fell of their own weight.”

“Nay, nay, good Sumach,” interrupted the Deerslayer, whose love of truth was too indomitable to listen to such hyperbole with patience, even though it came from the torn breast of a widow; “Nay nay, good Sumach, this is a little outdoing redskin privileges. Young man was neither, any more than you can be called a young woman; and as to the Great Spirit’s intending that they should fall otherwise than they did, that’s a grievous mistake, inasmuch as what the Great Spirit intends is sartain to come to pass. Then, ag‘in, it’s plain enough neither of your fri’nds did me any harm. I raised my hand ag‘in ’em on account of what they were striving to do, rather than what they did. This is nat‘ral law, ’to do, lest you should be done by’ ”

“It is so. Sumach has but one tongue; she can tell but one story. The paleface struck the Hurons, lest the Hurons should strike him. The Hurons are a just