While he was living at Prairie du Chien, in the employ of the American Fur Company, the chiefs and other Indians from the Upper Mississippi used frequently to come to the place to sell their furs and peltries, and to purchase merchandise, ammunition, trinkets, etc.

As is usual with all who are not yet acclimated, he was seized with chills and fever.  One day, while suffering with an unusually severe access of the latter, a chief of the Four-Legs family, a brother to the one before mentioned, came in to the Company’s warehouse to trade.  There is no ceremony or restraint among the Indians:  so, hearing that Shaw-nee-aw-kee was sick, Four-Legs instantly made his way to him, to offer his sympathy and prescribe the proper remedies.

Every one who has suffered from ague and the intense fever that succeeds it, knows how insupportable is the protracted conversation of an inconsiderate person, and will readily believe that the longer Four-Legs continued his pratings the higher mounted the fever of the patient, and the more intolerable became the pain of head, back, and limbs.

At length the old man arrived at the climax of what he had to say.  “It was not good for a young man, suffering with sickness, and away from his family, to be without a home and a wife.  He had a nice daughter at home, handsome and healthy, a capital nurse, the best hand in all the tribe at trapping beaver and musk-rats.  He was coming down again in the spring, and he would bring her with him, and Shaw-nee-aw-kee should see that he had told no falsehood about her.  Should he go now, and bring his daughter the next time he came?”

Stunned with his importunate babble, and anxious only for rest and quiet, poor Shaw-nee-aw-kee eagerly assented, and the chief took his departure.

So nearly had his disorder been aggravated to delirium, that the young man forgot entirely, for a time, the interview and the proposal which had been made him.  But it was recalled to his memory some months after, when Four-Legs made his appearance, bringing with him a squaw of mature age, and a very Hecate for ugliness.  She carried on her shoulders an immense pack of furs, which, approaching with her awkward criss-cross gait, she threw at his feet, thus marking, by an Indian custom, her sense of the relation that existed between them.

The conversation with her father now flashed across his mind, and he began to be sensible that he had got into a position that it would require some skill to extricate himself from.

He bade one of the young clerks take up the pack and carry it into the magazine where the furs were stored; then he coolly went on talking with the chief about indifferent matters.

Miss Four-Legs sat awhile with a sulky, discontented air; at length she broke out,—­

“Humph! he seems to take no more notice of me than if I was nobody!”

He again turned to the clerk.—­“Give her a calico shirt and half a dozen bread-tickets.”