e the ancestral--the maternal--roots
of those two rival and hostile families whose descendants--some brave,
others fair--we find unwittingly thrown together at the ball, and with
whom we are shortly to have the honor of an unmasked acquaintance.

CHAPTER IV

FAMILY TREES

In the year 1673, and in the royal hovel of a Tchoupitoulas village not
far removed from that "Buffalo's Grazing-ground," now better known as
New Orleans, was born Lufki-Humma, otherwise Red Clay. The mother of Red
Clay was a princess by birth as well as by marriage. For the father,
with that devotion to his people's interests presumably common to
rulers, had ten moons before ventured northward into the territory of
the proud and exclusive Natchez nation, and had so prevailed with--so
outsmoked--their "Great Sun," as to find himself, as he finally knocked
the ashes from his successful calumet, possessor of a wife whose
pedigree included a long line of royal mothers--fathers being of little
account in Natchez heraldry--extending back beyond the Mexican origin
of her nation, and disappearing only in the effulgence of her great
original, the orb of day himself. As to Red Clay's paternal ancestry, we
must content ourselves with the fact that the father was not only the
diplomate we have already found him, but a chief of considerable
eminence; that is to say, of seven feet stature.

It scarce need be said that when Lufki-Humma was born, the mother arose
at once from her couch of skins, herself bore the infant to the
neighboring bayou and bathed it--not for singularity, nor for
independence, nor for vainglory, but only as one of the heart-curdling
conventionalities which made up the experience of that most pitiful of
holy things, an Indian mother.

Outside the lodge door sat and continued to sit, as she passed out, her
master or husband. His interest in the trivialities of the moment may be
summed up in this, that he was as fully prepared as some men are in more
civilized times and places to hold his queen to strict account for the
sex of her offspring. Girls for the Natchez, if they preferred them, but
the chief of the Tchoupitoulas wanted a son. She returned from the
water, came near, sank upon her knees, laid the infant at his feet, and
lo! a daughter.

Then she fell forward heavily upon her face. It may have been muscular
exhaustion, it may have been the mere wind of her hasty-tempered
matrimonial master's stone hatchet as it whiffed by he