“I will give it to one of my squaws,” he said.  “The papooses in my lodge will play with it.  Come, Medecine, Tatua will go and drink fire-water;” and, shouldering his carabine, he turned his broad back without ceremony upon the monarch and his train, and disappeared down one of the walks of the garden.  Franklin found him when his own interview with the French Chief Magistrate was over; being attracted to the spot where the Chief was, by the crack of his well-known rifle.  He was laughing in his quiet way.  He had shot the Colonel of the Swiss Guards through his cockade.

Three days afterwards, as the gallant frigate, the “Repudiator,” was sailing out of Brest Harbor, the gigantic form of an Indian might be seen standing on the binnacle in conversation with Commodore Bowie, the commander of the noble ship.  It was Tatua, the Chief of the Nose-rings.

II.

Leatherlegs and Tom Coxswain did not accompany Tatua when he went to the Parisian metropolis on a visit to the father of the French pale-faces.  Neither the Legs nor the Sailor cared for the gayety and the crowd of cities; the stout mariner’s home was in the puttock-shrouds of the old “Repudiator.”  The stern and simple trapper loved the sound of the waters better than the jargon of the French of the old country.  “I can follow the talk of a Pawnee,” he said, “or wag my jaw, if so be necessity bids me to speak, by a Sioux’s council-fire and I can patter Canadian French with the hunters who come for peltries to Nachitoches or Thichimuchimachy; but from the tongue of a Frenchwoman, with white flour on her head, and war-paint on her face, the Lord deliver poor Natty Pumpo.”

“Amen and amen!” said Tom Coxswain.  “There was a woman in our aft-scuppers when I went a-whalin in the little ’Grampus’—­and Lord love you, Pumpo, you poor land-swab, she was as pretty a craft as ever dowsed a tarpauling—­there was a woman on board the ‘Grampus,’ who before we’d struck our first fish, or biled our first blubber, set the whole crew in a mutiny.  I mind me of her now, Natty,—­her eye was sich a piercer that you could see to steer by it in a Newfoundland fog; her nose stood out like the ‘Grampus’s’ jibboom, and her woice, Lord love you, her woice sings in my ears even now:—­it set the Captain a-quarrelin with the Mate, who was hanged in Boston harbor for harpoonin of his officer in Baffin’s Bay;—­it set me and Bob Bunting a-pouring broadsides into each other’s old timbers, whereas me and Bob was worth all the women that ever shipped a hawser.  It cost me three years’ pay as I’d stowed away for the old mother, and might have cost me ever so much more, only bad luck to me, she went and married a little tailor out of Nantucket; and I’ve hated women and tailors ever since!” As he spoke, the hardy tar dashed a drop of brine from his tawny cheek, and once more betook himself to splice the taffrail.