sappointment have
been seen; and Abiram now sat apart, plotting the means, by which he
might secure to himself the advantages of his undertaking, which he
perceived were each moment becoming more uncertain, through the open
admiration of Mahtoree for the innocent subject of his villany. We shall
leave him to his vacillating and confused expedients, in order to pass
to the description of certain other personages in the drama.

There was still another corner of the picture that was occupied. On a
little bank, at the extreme right of the encampment, lay the forms of
Middleton and Paul. Their limbs were painfully bound with thongs, cut
from the skin of a bison, while, by a sort of refinement in cruelty,
they were so placed, that each could see a reflection of his own misery
in the case of his neighbour. Within a dozen yards of them a post
was set firmly in the ground, and against it was bound the light and
Apollo-like person of Hard-Heart. Between the two stood the trapper,
deprived of his rifle, his pouch and his horn, but otherwise left in a
sort of contemptuous liberty. Some five or six young warriors, however,
with quivers at their backs, and long tough bows dangling from their
shoulders, who stood with grave watchfulness at no great distance from
the spot, sufficiently proclaimed how fruitless any attempt to escape,
on the part of one so aged and so feeble, might prove. Unlike the other
spectators of the important conference, these individuals were engaged
in a discourse that for them contained an interest of its own.

"Captain," said the bee-hunter with an expression of comical concern,
that no misfortune could depress in one of his buoyant feelings, "do you
really find that accursed strap of untanned leather cutting into your
shoulder, or is it only the tickling in my own arm that I feel?"

"When the spirit suffers so deeply, the body is insensible to pain,"
returned the more refined, though scarcely so spirited Middleton; "would
to Heaven that some of my trusty artillerists might fall upon this
accursed encampment!"

"You might as well wish that these Teton lodges were so many hives of
hornets, and that the insects would come forth and battle with yonder
tribe of half naked savages." Then, chuckling with his own conceit, the
bee-hunter turned away from his companion, and sought a momentary relief
from his misery, by imagining that so wild an idea might be realised,
and fancying the manner, in which the attack wou