“Does my brother feel pain?” was the taunting reply.  “If he is come to us with a trophy, it is not without being dearly bought.  The Saganaw has spilt his blood.”

“The weapons of the Saganaw, like those of the smooth face of the Ottawa, are without sting,” angrily retorted the other.  “They only prick the skin like a thorn; but when Wacousta drinks the blood of his enemy,” and he glanced his eye fiercely at the young man, “it is the blood next his heart.”

“My brother has always big words upon his lips,” returned the young chief, with a scornful sneer at the implied threat against himself.  “But where are his proofs?”

For a moment the eye of the party thus challenged kindled into flame, while his lips were firmly compressed together; and as he half bent himself forward, to scan with greater earnestness the features of his questioner, his right hand sank to his left side, tightly grasping the handle of his scalping-knife.  The action was but momentary.  Again he drew himself up, puffed the smoke deliberately from his bloody tomahawk, and, thrusting his right hand into his bosom, drew leisurely forth a reeking scalp, which he tossed insolently across the fire into the lap of the young chief.  A loud and general “ugh!” testified the approbation of the assembled group, at the unequivocal answer thus given to the demand of the youth.  The eye of the huge warrior sparkled with a deep and ferocious exultation.

“What says the smooth face of the Ottawas now?” he demanded, in the same insolent strain.  “Does it make his heart sick to look upon the scalp of a great chief?”

The young man quietly turned the horrid trophy over several times in his hand, examining it attentively in every part.  Then tossing it back with contemptuous coolness to its owner, he replied,—­

“The eyes of my brother are weak with age.  He is not cunning, like a red skin.  The Ottawa has often seen the Saganaw in their fort, and he knows their chiefs have fine hair like women; but this is like the bristles of the fox.  My brother has not slain a great chief, but a common warrior.”

A flush of irrepressible and threatening anger passed over the features of the vast savage.

“Is it for a boy,” he fiercely asked, “whose eyes know not yet the colour of blood, to judge of the enemies that fall by the tomahawk of Wacousta? but a great warrior never boasts of actions that he does not achieve.  It is the son of the great chief of the Saganaw whom he has slain.  If the smooth face doubts it, and has courage to venture, even at night, within a hundred yards of the fort, he will see a Saganaw without a scalp; and he will know that Saganaw by his dress—­the dress,” he pursued, with a low emphatic laugh, “that Oucanasta, the sister of the smooth face, loved so much to look upon.”