The Whirlwind invited us one day to his lodge.  The feast was finished, and the pipe began to circulate.  It was a remarkably large and fine one, and I expressed my admiration of its form and dimensions.

“If the Meneaska likes the pipe,” asked The Whirlwind, “why does he not keep it?”

Such a pipe among the Ogallalla is valued at the price of a horse.  A princely gift, thinks the reader, and worthy of a chieftain and a warrior.  The Whirlwind’s generosity rose to no such pitch.  He gave me the pipe, confidently expecting that I in return should make him a present of equal or superior value.  This is the implied condition of every gift among the Indians as among the Orientals, and should it not be complied with the present is usually reclaimed by the giver.  So I arranged upon a gaudy calico handkerchief, an assortment of vermilion, tobacco, knives, and gunpowder, and summoning the chief to camp, assured him of my friendship and begged his acceptance of a slight token of it.  Ejaculating how!  How! he folded up the offerings and withdrew to his lodge.

Several days passed and we and the Indians remained encamped side by side.  They could not decide whether or not to go to war.  Toward evening, scores of them would surround our tent, a picturesque group.  Late one afternoon a party of them mounted on horseback came suddenly in sight from behind some clumps of bushes that lined the bank of the stream, leading with them a mule, on whose back was a wretched negro, only sustained in his seat by the high pommel and cantle of the Indian saddle.  His cheeks were withered and shrunken in the hollow of his jaws; his eyes were unnaturally dilated, and his lips seemed shriveled and drawn back from his teeth like those of a corpse.  When they brought him up before our tent, and lifted him from the saddle, he could not walk or stand, but he crawled a short distance, and with a look of utter misery sat down on the grass.  All the children and women came pouring out of the lodges round us, and with screams and cries made a close circle about him, while he sat supporting himself with his hands, and looking from side to side with a vacant stare.  The wretch was starving to death!  For thirty-three days he had wandered alone on the prairie, without weapon of any kind; without shoes, moccasins, or any other clothing than an old jacket and pantaloons; without intelligence and skill to guide his course, or any knowledge of the productions of the prairie.  All this time he had subsisted on crickets and lizards, wild onions, and three eggs which he found in the nest of a prairie dove.  He had not seen a human being.  Utterly bewildered in the boundless, hopeless desert that stretched around him, offering to his inexperienced eye no mark by which to direct his course, he had walked on in despair till he could walk no longer, and then crawled on his knees until the bone was laid bare.  He chose the night for his traveling, lying down by day to sleep in the glaring sun, always dreaming, as he said, of the broth and corn cake he used to eat under his old master’s shed in Missouri.  Every man in the camp, both white and red, was astonished at his wonderful escape not only from starvation but from the grizzly bears which abound in that neighborhood, and the wolves which howled around him every night.