“Let Ohquamehud listen, and the darkness shall depart from his path.  The sun has eaten the snows of fifteen winters, and fifteen times the song of the summer birds have been silent since the Long Beard came to the river of the Pequots.  And the pale faces desired his companionship, but he turned away his steps from theirs, and built his wigwam on the Salmon Isle, for the heart of the Long Beard was lonely.  There he speaks to the Great Spirit in the morning clouds.  The young cub that sprung from the loins of Huttamoiden had already put on his moccasins for the Spirit land, and the tears of Peena were falling fast when the Long Beard came to her wigwam.  And he stretched his arms over the boy and asked of the Great Spirit that he might stay to lead his mother by the hand when she should be old and blind, and to pluck the thorns from her feet.  And the Great Spirit listened, for he loves the Long Beard, and unloosed the moccasins from the feet of the boy, and the fire in his breath went out, and he slept, and was well.  Therefore is Peena a bird to fly with the messages of the Long Beard.  But this is the first time she has heard from white lips the language of the red man.”

The Indian could now comprehend the conduct of the woman.  It was natural she should be grateful to the savior of her child’s life, and ready to show the feeling by the little means in her power.  Could he have looked into her heart, he would have seen that there was more than mere gratitude there.  Holden’s conduct, so different from that of other white men; the disinterested nature of his character showing itself in acts of kindness to all; his seclusion; his gravity, which seldom admitted of a smile; his imposing appearance, and his mysterious communings with some unseen power—­for she had often seen him as he stood to watch for the rising sun, and heard his wild bursts of devotion—­had made a deep impression on the squaw, and invested him with the attributes of a superior being; a feeling which was participated in by many of the Indians.

But if Ohquamehud could have seen all this, it would have served only to aggravate the suspicions he begun to entertain about the Long Beard, as he and the woman called Holden.  As an Indian, he was suspicious of even the kindness of the white man, lest some evil design might lurk beneath.  What wonder, when we consider the relation of one to the other?  How much of our history is that of the wolf, who charged the lamb, who drank below him, with muddying the stream?

Ohquamehud, a Pequot by birth, was a stranger who, but a few days before, had come from a Western tribe, into which he had been adopted, either to visit the graves of his fathers, or for some of those thousand causes of relationship, or friendship, or policy, which will induce the North American Indian to journey hundreds of miles, and saw the Recluse, for the first time, that morning.  If the gratitude of the squaw was explained, which, he doubted not, was undeserved, the