look at him much. The pale-face beauty has eyes too?"

"June!--what do these words--that look--imply? what would you say?"

"Why you so 'fraid June shoot Arrowhead?"

"Would it not have been horrible to see a wife destroy her own husband?
No, June, rather would I have died myself."

"Very sure, dat all?"

"That was all, June, as God is my judge!--and surely that was enough.
No, no! there have been sufficient horrors to-day, without increasing
them by an act like this. What other motive can you suspect?"

"Don't know. Poor Tuscarora girl very foolish. Arrowhead great chief,
and look all round him. Talk of pale-face beauty in his sleep. Great
chief like many wives."

"Can a chief possess more than one wife, June, among your people?"

"Have as many as he can keep. Great hunter marry often. Arrowhead got
only June now; but he look too much, see too much, talk too much of
pale-face girl."

Mabel was conscious of this fact, which had distressed her not a
little, in the course of their journey; but it shocked her to hear this
allusion, coming, as it did, from the mouth of the wife herself. She
knew that habit and opinions made great differences in such matters;
but, in addition to the pain and mortification she experienced at being
the unwilling rival of a wife, she felt an apprehension that jealousy
would be but an equivocal guarantee for her personal safety in her
present situation. A closer look at June, however, reassured her;
for, while it was easy to trace in the unpractised features of this
unsophisticated being the pain of blighted affections, no distrust could
have tortured the earnest expression of her honest countenance into that
of treachery or hate.

"You will not betray me, June?" Mabel said, pressing the other's hand,
and yielding to an impulse of generous confidence. "You will not give up
one of your own sex to the tomahawk?"

"No tomahawk touch you. Arrowhead no let 'em. If June must have
sister-wife, love to have you."

"No, June; my religion, my feelings, both forbid it; and, if I could be
the wife of an Indian at all, I would never take the place that is yours
in a wigwam."

June made no answer, but she looked gratified, and even grateful. She
knew that few, perhaps no Indian girl within the circle of Arrowhead's
acquaintance, could compare with herself in personal attractions; and,
though it might suit her husband to marry a dozen wives, she knew of no
one, beside Mabel, whose influence sh