The next morning was calm.  The Indians took a short course by sailing straight to an island out in the lake.  But after they had got far out, the wind began to blow very hard.  They expected every moment that their canoe would be swallowed up by the waves.  They began to pray to the rattlesnake to help them.  One of the chiefs resolved to make a sacrifice to the snake.  He took a dog, and tied its legs together, and threw it into the water.  He asked the snake spirit to be satisfied with this.  But the wind continued to grow higher, and so another dog was thrown into the water, and some tobacco was thrown with it.  The chief told Grandfather Snake that the man who wanted to kill him was really a white man, and no kin to the snake or to the Indians.

Some of the Indians began to think of throwing Mr. Henry in after the dog and the tobacco to satisfy the snake spirit; but the wind went down, and they soon got to the island.  Some days afterward the party came to the fort.  The English general was very glad to see Mr. Henry, and his long captivity was over, in spite of the anger of the rattlesnake god of the Indians.

WITCHCRAFT IN LOUISIANA.

The Indian medicine men or priests have many ways of deceiving their people.  A French officer found that the people of a certain tribe believed very much in an idol which a medicine man had set up.  This idol was called by a long name, Vistee-poolee-keek-apook.  The Indians, when they stood near, would sometimes hear it speak, and this seemed to them a very wonderful thing.

A French officer named Bossu tried to find out what made the idol talk.  He found a long reed, such as we call a cane pole, running from the back of the idol’s head to a cave or hollow in the rocks behind the idol.  This reed had been made into a hollow tube.  In the cave there was a medicine man who talked into the tube.  The words coming out of the other end in the idol’s head were heard from the mouth of the idol, as if the idol were speaking.  Bossu showed the Indians the trick, and then got one of his soldiers to destroy the idol.

The soldier that destroyed the idol was so brave, that the Frenchmen had given him a nickname which means “fearless.”  The medicine man declared that some dreadful thing would fall on Fearless because he had destroyed the idol.  In order to make his people believe in the power of this god that had been thrown down, he told them that there was a witch or evil spirit which came to the village in the shape of a little black panther.  He said, that, whenever he pronounced the name of his god, this little black panther would instantly disappear.

You see, the cunning old medicine man had somehow got hold of a large black cat with yellow eyes.  Cats were not common among the Indians, these animals having been brought by the white people.  Such a cat as this, the Indians had never seen.  The medicine man kept the cat in his cabin, and trained it.  He would strike it with a whip, crying out every time he struck it, “Vistee-poolee-keek-apook!”