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But it ain't likely but what they'll adopt you; and if they do they'll take you down to the river, and wash you and scrub you, so's to get all the white man off, and then pull out your hair, a hair at a time, till there's nothing but the scalp-lock left, so that your enemies can scalp you handy; and then you're just as good an Indian as anybody, and nobody can pick on you, or anything.
I managed to get my horse about in time to see Suh-tai, who had caught up with us, trying to snatch the Potawatami's scalp, but his knife turned on one of the silver plates through which his scalp-lock was pulled, and all the Suh-tai got was a lock of the hair. In his excitement he thought it was the scalp and went shaking it and shouting like a wild man.
"Set us afoot," another growled and pointed after the stampeded horses. Smith lay quite still as he had fallen. They thought him dead. Within the hour, a dozen whooping Comanches ran their ponies up the hill toward his limp form. To gain that scalp-lock under fire would be an exploit worth telling to their grandchildren in after years. And there was the long-barreled rifle as a bit of plunder.
Tired with the stress of mental depression and anxiety as physical effort could not tame him, and vaguely prescient of evil, Otasite had flung himself down on one of these, which was spread with dressed panther-skins, his hands clasped under his head, his scalp-lock of two auburn curls dangling over them.
The sunlight fell, glittering very white, on the young fellow's doeskin garb, his prickly belt of fangs, his bare chest with the blue warrior's marks, the curls of his auburn scalp-lock tossing in the wind.
The men were painted in every conceivable way, with hideous daubs of color upon their limbs and faces, or tattooed so as to look more fearful still; their heads were closely shaved, leaving only a lock on the crown, called the scalp-lock, which was twisted up so as to hold tufts of brilliant feathers. The scene was certainly not likely to inspire the prisoners with any keen sense of security.
He gave me his brush, I mean his scalp-lock, afterward, and it now adorns " Here her amusement became ungovernable, and she went into fits of laughter, which Imogen's astonished look only served to increase. "Oh!" she cried, between her paroxysms, "you believed it all! it is too absurd, but you really believed it! I thought till just now that you were only pretending, to amuse me."
We were of course pleased at the opportunity of hearing an Indian war-chant, with a skull and thigh-bone accompaniment; but what was our astonishment to hear the Indian, a ferocious-looking dog, with an awful scalp-lock, and two streaks of red paint across his chest, clear his voice well for a few seconds, and then begin, without discomposing a muscle of his gravity, "The Laird of Cockpen!"
He was a tall slight young man, very dark, with piercing black eyes, and a grim square relentless mouth which could only have come with Indian descent. His coarse flowing hair was gathered up into a scalp-lock, and the eagle feather which he wore in it was his only headgear.
The relics obtained with the bodies include a few wooden vessels scooped out smoothly; a piece of dark, greenish, flat stone, harder than the emerald, which the Indians use to tan skins; a scalp-lock of jet-black hair; a small rude figure, which may have been a very ugly doll or an idol; two or three tiny carvings in ivory of the sea-lion, very neatly executed, a comb, a necklet made of birds' claws inserted into one another, and several specimens of little bags, and a cap plaited out of sea-grass and almost water-tight."
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