had anything to do with their conduct or not, I cannot say, but certain it is that no further ceremonies towards making him a red-man were performed though he was allowed to wear his Indian costume.  Neither did they allow him to hunt with them, as he had hoped.  Whenever they went forth to shoot the bison or deer, or to trap the beavers, or wage war with hostile tribes, they always left him with the squaws, the old men, and the warriors who remained at home to take charge of the settlement.

Rudolph and Kitty were sorely frightened when they first saw the strange figure, “half Indian, half Tom,” as Rudolph afterward described him, stalk into Ka-te-qua’s wigwam.  His bald head and painted body struck poor Kitty with dismay.  When he spoke soothingly to her, and gave her a handful of bright feathers, she ventured to approach him, though she cried pitifully all the time for Tom, dear, big Tom, who knew papa and mamma, and Bessie and Bouncer.

Neither Kitty nor Rudolph had forgotten the brave dog through all these days of absence, and they loved to hold long conversations with Tom about him; though the little creatures oftener talked of their parents and Bessie, as they lay at night upon their beds of dried grass.

[Footnote 2:  See American Adventure by Land and Sea.  Harper Bros. 1842.]

[Footnote 3:  Wampum.  Beads made of shells, used by North American Indians as money, the shells run on strings, and are wrought into belts and ornaments.]

VIII.

BOUNCER’S WORK.

There was another person in the settlement besides the captives, who was not likely to forget Bouncer very soon.  This was an Indian who, wounded and exhausted, had reached the settlement four days after the arrival of the prisoners.  He had an ugly mark upon his throat, and another on his chest, and he sulked aside from the rest of his tribe as though he felt that his wounds were ignoble, and a dishonor to his Indian birth.  It was his blood that Farmer Hedden had seen on that fearful night; and when more than once the agonized father had listened to what seemed to be the tread of some skulking wolf, he had heard this very Indian, who, half dead with pain and loss of blood, was dragging himself slowly through the depths of the forest.

This discomfited warrior had looked upon Tom and the two little pale-faces with dislike, from the hour when he first saw them as prisoners in the encampment.  They were constant reminders to him of his mortifying struggle with the dog.  He felt it all the more because, though his jacket and leggings were trimmed with the scalps of his enemies, he had lately been forced to receive charity from the white man’s hand, This was when, starving and nearly frozen, he had fallen helpless in the forest, after an unlucky trapping excursion; a settler had found him there, given him food and drink and sent him on his way with a bountiful supply of provisions.