He perceived at length that he could not keep the direction, that he was wandering in a circle after the manner of those lost in forests.  His clothing, freezing upon his body, was calculated for warmer weather; the buckskin shirt and leggings, the garb of the frontiersmen, copied from the attire of the Indians, were of a thin and pliable texture, owing to the peculiar skill of the savages in dressing peltry.  An early historian describes such costume in a curiously sophisticated phrase as the “summer visiting dress of the Indians.”  The southern tribes were intensely averse to cold, for in winter they wore furs and garments made of buffalo hides, the shaggy side inward; this raiment was sewed with the sinews of deer and a kind of wild hemp for thread, and with needles dexterously fashioned of fishbone.

Barnett had now no thought of the ghosts of the old “waste town.”  His first care was to save his life this cruel night; without fire, without food, without shelter, it might be that he had indeed come to the end.  He was induced by this reflection to climb the mound to the old council-house.  For here the walls, plastered both within and without with the strong adhesive red clay of the region, admitted no wind, while in the cabins which had been dwellings the drifts lay deep beneath the rifts in the dilapidated roofs and the crevices in the wall, and the flying flakes sifted in as the keen gusts surged through.  He had had the forethought to gather as he went bits of wood, now a loose clapboard or piece of bark from low-hanging eaves, now a fragment of half-rotten puncheon from a doorstep, and as he groped into the dense darkness of the council-house with his steel and flint he set them alight on the hearth in the centre of the floor.

When he was once more warm and free of the fear of death, other fears took hold upon him.  In the first glimmers of the fire he could see through the tall narrow doorless portal only the dark night outside and a flickering glimpse against its blackness of the quivering crystals of the snow,—­these but vaguely, for the blue smoke eddying through the great room veiled the opposite side, there being no chimney or window, and he sat in the interior behind the fire.

He gazed furtively over his shoulder ever and anon, as the flames flared up, revealing the deeply red walls of the dome-like place with here and there a buffalo skin suspended against them, the inside of the hide showing, painted in curious hieroglyphics, brilliant with color, and instinct with an untranslated meaning; a number of conch shells lay about, with jars and vases of clay, and those quaintly fashioned earthen drums, the heads of tightly stretched deerskin,—­all paraphernalia of the savage worship which the cheera-taghe had conducted, now abandoned as bewitched.