He had already considered the several physical powers of the whole party, and had duly compared their abilities with what he supposed might have been their intentions.

Warriors they were not, for the Big-knives, like the Siouxes, left their women in their villages when they went out on the bloody path.

The same objections applied to them as hunters, and even as traders, the two characters under which the white men commonly appeared in their villages.

He had heard of a great council, at which the Menahashah, or Long-knives, and the Washsheomantiqua, or Spaniards, had smoked together, when the latter had sold to the former their incomprehensible rights over those vast regions, through which his nation had roamed, in freedom, for so many ages.

His simple mind had not been able to embrace the reasons why one people should thus assume a superiority over the possessions of another, and it will readily be perceived, that at the hint just received from the trapper, he was not indisposed to fancy that some of the hidden subtilty of that magical influence, of which he was so firm a believer, was about to be practised by the unsuspecting subject of their conversation, in furtherance of these mysterious claims.