instantaneously. Overjoyed at having in their possession one whose presence they superstitiously believed to be a pledge of good luck to their lodges, the captors hastened homeward, guarding him with the utmost vigilance, but always refraining from binding his limbs, as they did not despair now by large promises and offers to induce him to acknowledge his Pawnee paternity. Accordingly, the chiefs loaded him with honors and caresses, and made him proffers of squaws, horses, lodges, robes, and, in short, every thing which constitutes savage wealth; to all of which he listened with a contemptuous indifference and total silence, which was sufficient answer in itself. At this time there existed among the Pawnees a custom probably derived originally from the Mandans, remains of whose villages are to be seen even so low down the Missouri as the mouth of the Platte, the words used to designate it being found in the latter tongue; this custom was to select every alternate ten years the most beautiful female child of the tribe, who was placed under the strict guardianship of two old squaws, without whom she left the medicine-lodge neither day nor night, and between whom she was obliged to sleep until her term of years expired, in order that she might be a pure sacrifice to the Evil Spirit during the feast of green corn, at the termination of the ten years, when, in the midst of barbarous ceremonies, games, etc., the victim suddenly disappeared no one but the medicine-men knew where. This doomed girl was called MAH-PEN’KE’KA-MORSE,[4] (wife of the Evil Spirit,) and they supposed, caused the fiend to abstain from injuring the tribe to which he was related by marriage. Now as Ta-his-ka was believed to be in some sort supernatural, one of the divisions of the medicine-lodge was assigned him, and the partitions in an Indian house being neither so impervious to sight nor bodily passage as plastered walls, a most unheard-of thing took place—the appointed squaw of the Evil One yielded up her heart and person to the illustrious prisoner, eluding nightly the vigilance of her duennas. As for Ta-his-ka, he loved for the first time, and with all the resistless passion of a wild but earnest soul; thus, although he was brought every moon before the council of chiefs, and the former offers renewed only to be answered by the same stern silence, (for no man had heard him speak since his capture,) he made no attempt at escape, contenting himself with merely food enough to sustain life, and scorning to touch the prairie delicacies daily set before him.