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Besides Crooked Claw, thar's Bill's widow aunt, the Wild Cat she's plumb cunnin', the Wild Cat is, an' jest then bein' cel'brated among the Osages for smokin' ponies with Black B'ar, a old buck, an' smokin' Black B'ar out of his two best cayouses.
Continuing their progress up the Missouri, the party encamped on the evening of the 21st of March, in the neighborhood of a little frontier village of French creoles. Here Pierre Dorion met with some of his old comrades, with whom he had a long gossip, and returned to the camp with rumors of bloody feuds between the Osages and the loways, or Ayaways, Potowatomies, Sioux, and Sawkees.
After visiting the Creeks and Choctaws, he was to pass through the land of the Osages and return by the Missouri river. Before his return, the last hope of the red man was to be forever crushed, and the old dream of Pontiac forever dispelled. The Governor has paid a just and worthy tribute to his savage foe.
What he confessed led the priest to take him at once to the Osages farther down on the Neosho. "I had hoped to persuade Jean to stay at the Mission," Le Claire said afterwards. "He is the most intelligent one of his own tribe I have ever known, and he could be invaluable to the Osages, but he would not stay away from Springvale. And I thought it best to come back with him."
That he had set us an example of forgiveness of injuries which we ought to follow. The Ottawas had murdered one of his women, and the Osages one of his relations, and yet he had forborne to revenge them that he had even taken the tomahawks out of the hands of those who were ready to march against the Osages.
Deerfoot directed his course toward the elevation where he and his friends stood when they first caught sight of the smoke of the camp-fire. It was an easy matter to determine, whether the Osages had discovered the horse while in that section. If they had not done so, the probabilities were against their finding him at all.
Their war-parties ranged the country from the northern English posts on the Slave Lake down south to the very borders of the Shoshones, and many among them had taken scalps of the Osages, near the Mississippi, and even of the great Pawnees. Between the Red River and the Platte they had once one hundred villages, thousands and thousands of horses. They numbered more than six thousand warriors.
Like a body of spectres they moved silently across the snow in the moonlight, cavalry capes drawn over their heads, the only sound the crunching of horses' hoofs breaking through the crust. The trail was as distinct as a road, and the guides pushed ahead as rapidly as by daylight, yet with ever increasing caution. Suddenly one of the Osages signalled for a halt, averring that he smelled fire.
The Wacoes, Panes, Osages, and bands from the Cherokee, Kickapoo, and other nations to the east, occasionally hunted there, and sanguinary conflicts occurred among them; so that one party or another often lost their season's hunt by the necessity of keeping out of each other's range; and the game was thus left undisturbed.
Mapleson's face had a look of pleasure as if he saw not only the opportunity to prove his cause, but the chance to grill the priest, whose gentle power had time and again led the Indians from his "Last Chance" saloon on annuity days, when the peaceful Osages and Kaws came up for their supplies.
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