"'There was a band formed to hunt for him. Snow was on the ground, and they found his tracks--my boy's tracks. They followed them, and saw that he had been pursuing a deer to the river. They came upon the deer, which he had killed and left hanging on the branch of a tree. It was as he had left it. "'But here they found the tracks of the white man. The pale-faces had been there, and had taken our boy prisoner. They followed the tracks and they found him. O Black Hawk! he was dead--my boy! The white men had murdered him for killing the deer near the fort; and the land was ours. His face was all shot to pieces. His body was stabbed through and through, and they had torn the hair from his head. They had tied his hands behind him before they murdered him. Black Hawk, my heart is dead. What do the hawks in the sky say?' "The old Indian fell into a stupor, from which he soon expired. Black Hawk watched over his body during the night, and the next day he buried it upon the bluff. It was at that grave that Black Hawk listened to the hawks in the sky, and vowed vengeance against the white people forever, and summoned his warriors for slaughter." "He's a hard Indian," said Thomas Lincoln. "Don't you trust Black Hawk. You don't know him." "Hard? Yes, but did not your brother Mordecai make the same vow and follow the same course after the murder of your father by the Indians? A slayer of man is a slayer of man whoever and wherever he may be. May the gospel bring the day when the shedding of human blood will cease! But the times are still evil. The world waits still for the manifestation of the sons of God; as of old it waits. I have given all I am to the teaching of the gospel of peace. The Indians need it; you need it, all of you. You do the same things that the savages do." "Just hear him!" said Aunt Indiana.--"Who are you preachin' to, elder? Callin' us savages! I'm an exhorter myself, I'd like to have you know. I could exhort _you_. Savages? We know Indians here better than you do. You wait." "Let me tell you a story now," said Thomas Lincoln. "Of course you will," said Aunt Indiana. "Thomas Lincoln never heard a story told without telling another one to match it; and Abe, here, is just like him. The thing that has been, is, as the Scriptur' says." _AN ASTONISHED INDIAN._ "Well," said Thomas Lincoln, "I hain't no faith at all, elder, in Injuns. I once knew of a woman in Kentuck, in my father's day, who knew enough for 'em, and the way that she cleared 'em out showed an amazin' amount of spirit. Women was women in Daniel Boone's time, in old Kentuck. The Injuns found 'em up and doin', and they learned to sidle away pretty rapid-like when they met a sun-bonnet. "Well, as I was sayin', this was in my father's time. The Injuns were prowlin' about pretty plenty then, and one day one of 'em came, all feathers and paint, and whoops and prancin's, to a house owned by a Mr. Daviess, and found that the man of the house was gone.