This gibberish, with which he seemed, besides expressing much new-born good will, to intimate that his cause lay in the belief that the prisoner was a great white conjuror, who could help him to a solution of sundry interesting questions, the old chief pronounced with much solemnity and suavity; and he betrayed an inclination to continue it, the captors of Nathan standing by and looking on with vast and eager interest. But a sudden and startling yell from the Indians who had charge of the young Virginian, preceded by an exclamation from the renegade who had stolen among them, upset the curiosity of the party,--or rather substituted a new object for admiration, which set them all running towards the fire, where Roland lay bound. The cause of the excitement was nothing less than the discovery which Doe had just made, of the identity of the prisoner with Roland Forrester, whom he had with his own hands delivered into those of the merciless Piankeshaws, and whose escape from them and sudden appearance in the Shawnee village were events just as wonderful to the savages as the supposed powers of the white medicine-man, his associate. But there was still a third prodigy to be wondered at. The third prisoner was dragged from among the horses to the fire, where he was almost immediately recognised by half a dozen different warriors, as the redoubted and incorrigible horse-thief, Captain Stackpole. The wonderful conjuror, and the wonderful young Long-knife, who was one moment a captive in the hands of Piankeshaws on the banks of the Wabash, and, the next, an invader of a Shawnee village in the valley of the Miami, were both forgotten: the captain of horse-thieves was a much more wonderful person,--or, at least, a much more important prize. His name was howled aloud and in a moment became the theme of every tongue; and he was instantly surrounded by every man in the village,--we may say, every woman and child, too, for the alarm had brought the whole village into the square; and the shrieks of triumph, the yells of unfeigned delight with which all welcomed a prisoner so renowned and so detested, produced an uproar ten times greater than that which gave the alarm.