“It is painful to dwell on this period of my life. Suffice it, again I heard the pleadings of love from the untutored lips of a savage chief. I, who had fled from the very name of affection as from a pestilence—who had given up country, home, the semblance of existence that my heart might be at rest, was forced to listen to the pleadings of love from a savage, in the heart of an American wilderness. A savage chief, proud of his prowess, haughty in his barbarous power, came with a lordly confidence to woo me as his wife. My heart recoiled at the unnatural suggestion, but I had no scorn for the brave Indian who made it. If his mode of wooing was rough, it was also eloquent, sincere, manly; and those were properties which my spirit had ever answered with respect. No; I had nothing of scorn for the red warrior, but I rebuked him for his boldness, and threatened to forsake his tribe forever should he dare to renew the subject. “A month or two after the kingly savage declared his bold wishes a contest arose between the Shawnees and a neighboring tribe, and the chief went angry to the warpath. One day his party returned to the encampment, bringing with them three prisoners, a white man, his wife and child. My heart ached when I heard of this, for I dared not, as usual, entreat the chief for their release, nor even offer to purchase their freedom with gold. His disappointment had rendered him almost morose, and I shuddered to think of the reward he might require for the liberation of his prisoners. I had full cause for apprehension. “From the day that I rejected her son, Queen Esther had kept proudly aloof from me. She did not deign to expostulate, but guarded her pride with stern silence, while a storm of savage passions lowered on her brow, and sounded in her fierce tread, till her presence would have been a terror to me had I been of a nature to fear anything. “This woman seemed to rejoice at the idea of wreaking the vengeance she would not express in words on my helpless compatriots, and prepared herself to join this horrid festival of death in all the pomp of her war-plumes and most gorgeous raiment. For the first time in my life I humbled myself before this woman, on my knees, for she was one to exact the most abject homage. I besought her to save my countrymen from death. “She met my entreaties with a cold sneer that froze me to the heart. “‘It is well,’ she said, wrapping her robe around her with a violence that made its wampum fringes rattle like a storm of shot. ‘The woman who refuses the great chief of the Shawnees when he would build her a lodge larger than his mother’s, should be proud, and stand up with her face to the sun, not whine like a baby because her people do not know how to die.’ “Her air and voice were more cruel than her words. I saw that my intercession would only add to the tortures that I was powerless to prevent, for if the mother was so unrelenting what had I to expect from the son?