CHAPTER XXVII.
I'll no swaggerers: I am in good name and fame with the very best: -- shut the door;--there come no swaggerers here: I have not lived all this while, to have swaggering now: shut the door, I pray you.
-- Shakspeare.
Mahtoree encountered, at the door of his lodge, Ishmael, Abiram, and Esther.

The first glance of his eye, at the countenance of the heavy-moulded squatter, served to tell the cunning Teton, that the treacherous truce he had made, with these dupes of his superior sagacity, was in some danger of a violent termination.
"Look you here, old grey-beard," said Ishmael, seizing the trapper, and whirling him round as if he had been a top; "that I am tired of carrying on a discourse with fingers and thumbs, instead of a tongue, ar' a natural fact; so you'll play linguister and put my words into Indian, without much caring whether they suit the stomach of a Red-skin or not." "Say on, friend," calmly returned the trapper; "they shall be given as plainly as you send them." "Friend!" repeated the squatter, eyeing the other for an instant, with an expression of indefinable meaning.

"But it is no more than a word, and sounds break no bones, and survey no farms.

Tell this thieving Sioux, then, that I come to claim the conditions of our solemn bargain, made at the foot of the rock." When the trapper had rendered his meaning into the Sioux language, Mahtoree demanded, with an air of surprise-- "Is my brother cold?
buffaloe skins are plenty.

Is he hungry?
Let my young men carry venison into his lodges." The squatter elevated his clenched fist in a menacing manner, and struck it with violence on the palm of his open hand, by way of confirming his determination, as he answered-- "Tell the deceitful liar, I have not come like a beggar to pick his bones, but like a freeman asking for his own; and have it I will.