The present occupant of the cabin happened to be a woman, who had lost a son during the war.  It is very probable that she was favorably impressed towards him by noting his fine person, and his firm and cheerful visage—­circumstances which impress the women of the red people still more strongly than the men.  She contemplated him stedfastly for some time, and sympathy and humanity triumphed, and she declared that she adopted him in place of the son she had lost.  The two young men, who bore the calumet, instantly unpinioned his hands, treating him with kindness and respect.  Food was brought him, and he was informed that he was considered as a son, and she, who had adopted him, as his mother.  He was soon made aware, by demonstrations that could not be dissembled or mistaken, that he was actually loved, and trusted, as if he really were, what his adoption purported to make him.  In a few days he suffered no other penalty of captivity than inability to return to his family.  He was sufficiently instructed in Indian customs to know well, that any discovered purpose or attempt to escape would be punished with instant death.

Strange caprice of inscrutable instincts and results of habit!  A circumstance, apparently fortuitous and accidental, placed him in the midst of an Indian family, the female owner of which loved him with the most disinterested tenderness, and lavished upon him all the affectionate sentiments of a mother towards a son.  Had the die of his lot been cast otherwise, all the inhabitants of the village would have raised the death song, and each individual would have been as fiercely unfeeling to torment him, as they were now covetous to show him kindness.  It is astonishing to see, in their habits of this sort, no interval between friendship and kindness, and the most ingenious and unrelenting barbarity.  Placed between two posts, and his arms and feet extended between them, nearly in the form of a person suffering crucifixion, he would have been burnt to death at a slow fire, while men, women, and children would have danced about him, occasionally applying torches and burning splinters to die most exquisitely sensible parts of the frame, prolonging his torture, and exulting in it with the demoniac exhilaration of gratified revenge.

This was the most common fate of prisoners of war at that time.  Sometimes they fastened the victim to a single stake, built a fire of green wood about him, and then raising their yell of exultation, marched off into the desert, leaving him to expire unheeded and alone.  At other times they killed their prisoners by amputating their limbs joint by joint.  Others they destroyed by pouring on them, from time to time, streams of scalding water.  At other times they have been seen to hang their victim to a sapling tree by the hands, bending it down until the wretched sufferer has seen himself swinging up and down at the play of the breeze, his feet often, within a foot of the ground.  In a word, they seem to have exhausted the invention and ingenuity of all time and all countries in the horrid art of inflicting torture.