“He met with Mosh Kohta; our warriors would not fight the strangers, for they were hungry, and their voices were soft; they were also too few to be feared, though their courage seemed great under misfortune, and they would sing and laugh while they suffered.  We gave them food, we helped them to take from the waters the planks of their big canoe, and to build the first wigwam in which the Pale-faces ever dwelt in Texas.  Two moons they remained hunting the buffalo with our young men, till at last their chief and his bravest warriors started in some small canoes of ours, to see if they could not enter the great stream, by following the coast towards the sunrise.  He was gone four moons, and when he returned, he had lost half of his men, by sickness, hunger, and fatigue; yet Mosh Kohta bade him not despair; the great chief promised the Pale-faces to conduct them in the spring to the great stream, and for several more moons we lived all together, as braves and brothers should.  Then, for the first time also, the Comanches got some of their rifles, and others knives.  Was it good—­was it bad?  Who knows?  Yet the lance and arrows killed as many buffaloes as lead and black dust (powder), and the squaws could take off the skin of a deer or a beaver without knives.  How they did it, no one knows now; but they did it, though they had not yet seen the keen and sharp knives of the Pale-faces.

“However, it was not long time before many of the strangers tired of remaining so far from their wigwams:  their chief every morning would look for hours towards the rising of the sun, as if the eyes of his soul could see through the immensity of the prairies; he became gloomy as a man of dark deeds (a Medecin), and one day, with half of his men, he began a long inland trail across prairies, swamps, and rivers, so much did he dread to die far from his lodge.  Yet he did die:  not of sickness, not of hunger, but under the knife of another Pale-face; and he was the first one from strange countries whose bones blanched without burial in the waste.  Often the evening breeze whispers his name along the swells of the southern plains, for he was a brave man, and no doubt he is now smoking with his great Manitou.

“Well, he started.  At that time the buffalo and the deer were plentiful, and the men went on their trail gaily till they reached the river of many forks (Trinity River), for they knew that every day brought them nearer and nearer to the forts of their people, though it was yet a long way—­very long.  The Pale-face chief had a son with him; a noble youth, fair to look upon, active and strong:  the Comanches loved him.  Mosh Kohta had advised him to distrust two of his own warriors; but he was young and generous, incapable of wrong or cowardice; he would not suspect it in others, especially among men of his own colour and nation, who had shared his toils, his dangers, his sorrows, and his joys.