“You’ll keep it for Luella’s sake.  She held it close when she went away; now I’m going, there’s no one else to care.  Bring it with you, when the Great Spirit calls.”

I could win no more words from the woman.  She spoke to those who came to her, and Saul said she told them that I had “taken away the torment.”

“I shall think my Lucy witches somebody beside poor Saul,” said my husband; and he gave a sigh as he stood in the tent-door, and watched the westering moon for the last time.

In the morning they told us that the Prophetess had gone into the light beyond the Sun.

Saul went in to see her, and as he came back to me I saw that he was not in a mood for words.  Our farewell was very silent.  Meotona went with us.  Once again, bounding over the prairie, my heart grew lighter than it had been for many days; but I had no opportunity to examine Luella’s treasure.

We met the long caravan of wagons on the summit of the Great Divide, and it was joy to unite my fate once more with that of my countrymen.  Saul saw this, and said,—­

“Know now, Lucy, that you have the portion meted out to me, when I saw the freemen of the wild coming.  Your pleasure is that of civilization; mine was that of barbaric life.  I bid adieu to it henceforth,”—­and my brave husband, at this instant, looked out upon the head-waters of the Neosho, where Nature, when she built up the world, must have made a storehouse of material, and never came back for her treasures, they lie so magnificently rolled over the land.

Saul’s eyes gathered up the view, as if they were, what they are, memory’s absorbents, and said, sadly,—­

“It is for the last time, Lucy!”

We went into corral the next evening by the side of a grassy mound covered with low-growing shrubs.

Afterwards Saul wandered out alone.  I would have gone with him; but at the instant I put my face outside the tent-door, the memory of the Indian woman’s caution came to me, and with it the opportunity to examine Luella’s secret.

I entered my tent, lighted the little lamp that had travelled a thousand miles and never done service till now, and opened Luella’s treasure.  It was wrapped in soft white fur, bound about with the long, dried grass that grows beside the Huron.  A scroll of parchment was rolled within it, faded, yellow, and old.  I opened it, with a smile at my strange inheritance.

At the first glance, I thought I had before me some Indian hieroglyphics; but bringing back from the place of its long obscurity the little knowledge of the French language that I held in possession, I deciphered, that, “fourscore years before, beside the froth of the Huron Water, Father Kino had performed the marriage-rite upon Luella, daughter of Uncas, of the Dacotahs, and Richard Monten, of Montreal.”  Below the certificate of the priest of the Church were strange characters beyond my power to decipher.