CHAPTER XXIV.

During my convalescence, my tent, or I should say, the lawn before it, became a kind of general divan, where the warriors and elders of the tribe would assemble, to smoke and relate the strange stories of days gone by.  Some of them appeared to me particularly beautiful; I shall, therefore, narrate them to the reader.  One old chief began as follows:—­

“I will tell ye of the Shkote-nah Pishkuan, or the boat of fire, when I saw it for the first time.  Since that, the grass has withered fifteen times in the prairies, and I have grown weak and old.  Then I was a warrior, and many scalps have I taken on the eastern shores of the Sabine.  Then, also, the Pale-faces living in the prairies were good; we fought them because we were enemies, but they never stole anything from us, nor we from them.

“Well, at that time, we were once in the spring hunting the buffalo.  The Caddoes, who are now a small tribe of starved dogs, were then a large powerful nation, extending from the Cross Timbers to the waters of the great stream, in the East, but they were gamblers and drunkards; they would sell all their furs for the; ‘Shoba-wapo’ (fire-water), and return to their villages to poison their squaws, and make brutes of their children.  Soon they got nothing more to sell; and as they could not now do without the ‘Shoba-wapo,’ they began to steal.  They would steal the horses and oxen of the Pale-faces, and say ‘The Comanches did it.’  When they killed trappers or travellers, they would go to the fort of the Yankees and say to them, ’Go to the wigwams of the Comanches, and you will see the scalps of your friends hanging upon long poles.’  But we did not care for we knew it was not true.

“A long time passed away, when the evil spirit of the Cad does whispered to them to come to the villages of the Comanches while they were hunting, and to take away with them all that they could.  They did so, entering the war-path as foxes and owls, during night.  When they arrived, they found nothing but squaws, old women, and little children.  Yet these fought well, and many of the Caddoes were killed before they abandoned their lodges.  They soon found us out in the hunting-ground; and our great chief ordered me to start with five hundred warriors, and never return until the Caddoes should have no home, and wander like deer and starved wolves in the open prairie.

“I followed the track.  First, I burnt their great villages in the Cross Timbers, and then pursued them in the swamps and cane-brakes of the East, where they concealed themselves among the long lizards of the water (the alligators).  We, however, came up with them again, and they crossed the Sabine, to take shelter among the Yankees, where they had another village, which was their largest and their richest.  We followed, and on the very shores of their river, although a thousand miles from our own country, and where the waters are dyed with the red clay of the soil, we encamped round their wigwams and prepared to conquer.