“A foolish little man, and evidently a great snob, or else rather daft upon some points,” Ethel reported to her aunt.  “And such a dull, discontented creature, with all his money!” Ethel had some trials of her own just then, and it was no great felicity to listen to Mr. Bates’s endless complaints, nor could she spare much sympathy for the sufferings of the exile of Tecumseh, with his rose-leaf sensibilities, inanities, absurdities.

Meanwhile, the young gentleman who was indirectly responsible for many a sad thought of two charming girls that we know of—­and who shall say how many more?—­was enjoying as much happiness as ever fell to any man in the capacity of ardent sportsman.  He had joined the duke and his party at St. Louis, and from there they had gone “well away from anywhere,” as he said in describing his adventures to Mr. Heathcote.  He had at last reached the ideal spot of all his wildest imaginations and most cherished hopes,—­“the wild part,”—­really the great prairies, about two hundred miles west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies.  The dream of his life was being fulfilled.  He related, in a style not conspicuous for literary merit, but very well suited to the simple annals of the rich, how, having first procured guides, tents, ambulances, camp-equipage, they had pushed on briskly to a military fort, where, having made friends with “a pleasant, gentlemanly set of fellows,” the commanding officer, “a friendly old buffer,” had courteously given them an escort to protect them from “those dirty, treacherous brutes, the Indians.”  Not a joy was wanting in this crowning bliss.  The guide was “a wonderful chap named Big-Foot Williams, so called by the Indians, good all around from knocking over a rabbit to tackling a grizzly,” with an amazing knowledge of woodcraft, “a nose like a bloodhound, an eye as cool as a toad’s.”  No special mention was made of his ear; but the first time he got off his horse and applied it to the earth, listening for the tramp of distant hoofs in a hushed silence, one bosom could hardly hold all the rapture that filled Mr. Ramsay’s figurative cup up to the brim.  And the tales he told of savageness long drawn out were as dew to the parched herb, greedily absorbed at every pore.  A portrait of “Black Eagle,” a noted chief, was given when they got among the Indians,—­“a great hulking slugger of a savage, awfully interesting, long, reaching step, magnificent muscles, snake eye, could thrash us all in turn if he liked.  The best of the lot.”

Even the noble red man was not insensible to the charms of this graceful, handsome young athlete who smiled at them perpetually and said, “Amigo! amigo!” at short intervals,—­a phrase suggested by the redoubtable Williams and varied occasionally by a prefix of his own, “Muchee amigo!” The way in which he tested the elasticity of their bows, inspected their guns, the game they had killed, the other natural objects about them, aroused a certain