eather-crested similitude of what he had been,
alert, powerful, gifted with human ingenuity, the craft of weapons,
mental endowment, and an immortal soul,--so they went in the wintry
moonlight!

There was naught in this detail of the annual procession of the bears,
always taking place before the period of their hibernation, that
surprised or angered Tus-ka-sah; but that they should break from their
ancient law, their established habit of exclusiveness, single out Amoyah
(of all the people in the world), summon him to attend their tribal
celebration, and participate in their parade, as the shadow of Eeon-a,
the Great Bear,--this passed the bounds of the possibilities. This
fantasy had not the shreds of verisimilitude!

Yet even while he argued within himself Tus-ka-sah noted the old
warrior's gaze fix spellbound upon Amoyah, the hands of Altsasti
petrify, the bead in one, the motionless thread in the other. The eyes
of the more remote of the group, who were seated on rugs around the
fire, glistened wide and startled, in the shadow, as Amoyah proceeded to
relate how it had chanced.

A frosty morning he said it was, and he was out in the mountain
a-hunting. He repeated the song which he had been singing, and the wind
as it swirled about the house must have caught his voice and carried it
far. It was a song chronicling the deeds of the Great Bear, and had a
meaningless refrain, "_Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah!"_ But
when he reached the advent upon the scene of the secondary hero, the
Great Bear himself, very polite, speaking excellent Cherokee ("since we
are alone," he said), very recognizant of the merits of Amoyah,--the
fame of which indeed was represented to have resounded through the
remotest seclusions of the ursine realm,--fiction though it all
obviously was, the man of facts could no longer endure this
magnification of his rival.

"The great Eeon-a said all that to you?" he sneered. "The fire-water at
the trading-house makes your heart very strong and your tongue crooked.
This sounds to me like the language of a simple seequa, not the Great
Bear--a mere bit of an opossum!"

Amoyah paused with a sudden gasp. He was not without an aggressive
temper, albeit, persuaded of his own perfection, he feared no rival, and
least of all Tus-ka-sah.

"You, Tus-ka-sah," he retorted angrily, "have evidently strongly shaken
hands with the discourse of the opossum, speaking its language like the
animal itself, and als