es. The skin of the first that is shot is
presented to a priest, who flings it back to the slayer to be retained
by him as a trophy, and at the same time asks from the Great Spirit that
this may prove only the harbinger of deer in abundance whenever wanted.
There was some slight dancing that evening in the sacred square, but not
of significance enough to make it an object with me to remain for it,
and as so many were reserving themselves for the winding-up assembly of
the ladies, on Sunday morning, I thought I would do the same. Some of
our party stayed, however, for the night. They found a miscellaneous
dance at a house in the vicinity,--negroes, borderers, and reprobate
Indians, all collected in one incongruous mass. A vagabond frontier man
there asked a girl to dance. She refused, and was going to dance with
another. The first drew his pistol, and swore if she would not dance
with him she should not dance at all. Twenty pistols were clicked in an
instant; but the borderer, with a horse-laugh, asked if they thought he
didn't know there was not a soul in that section of country who dared to
draw a trigger against him? He was right, for the pistols were dropped
and the room cleared on the instant; whereupon the bully borderer
clapped his wings and crowed and disappeared.

The assemblage of the females I was rather solicitous to see, and so I
was at my post betimes. I had long to wait. I heard the gathering cry
from the men on all sides, in the corn-fields and bushes; it was like
the neighing to each other of wild horses. After a while the ladies
began to arrive. The spectators crowded in.

The Indian men went to their places, and among them a party to sing
while the women danced, two of the men rattling the gourds. The
cauldrons had disappeared from the centre of the sacred square.

And now entered a long train of females, all dressed in long gowns, like
our ladies, but all with gay colors, and bright shawls of various hues,
and beads innumerable upon their necks, and tortoise-shell combs in
their hair, and ears bored all around the rim, from top to bottom, and
from every bore a massive ear-drop, very long, and generally of silver.
A selected number of the dancers wore under their robes, and girded upon
their calves, large squares of thick leather, covered all over with
terrapin-shells closed together and perforated and filled with pebbles,
which rattled like so many sleigh-bells. These they have the knack of
keeping