On the Pampas; Or, The Young SettlersHenty, G. A. (George Alfred)
General
On the Pampas; Or, The Young Settlers
Henty, G. A. (George Alfred)
Pampas (Argentina) -- Juvenile fiction
"Tawaina," she said, leaping to her feet.
He paid no attention to her call, and she repeated it in a louder
tone.
The principal chief stopped; Tawaina did the same. Then he walked
slowly toward the captive.
"Save me, Tawaina," she said, "and send me back again home."
Tawaina shook his head.
"Not can," he said. "Tawaina friend. Help some time--not now." And
he turned away again.
"Does the Raven know the White Bird," the chief asked him, "that
she sings his name?"
Tawaina paused and said:
"Tawaina knows her. Her father is the great white brave."
The Indian chief gave a bound of astonishment and pleasure.
"The white brave with the shooting flames?"
Tawaina nodded.
The Raven's meeting with Ethel had been apparently accidental, but
was in reality intentional. Her actual captor was one of the
chiefs, although not the principal one, of the Pampas Indians; and
in the division of the spoil, preparations for which were going on,
there was no doubt that she would be assigned to that tribe,
without any question upon the part of the Raven's people.
Now, however, that the Stag knew who the prisoner I was, he
determined to obtain her for his tribe. He therefore went direct to
the chief of the Pampas Indians, and asked that the white girl
might fall to his tribe.
The chief hesitated.
"She is our only captive," he said. "The people will like to see
her, and she will live in the lodge of the Fox, who carried her
off."
"The Stag would like her for a slave to his wife. He will give
fifty bullocks and two hundred sheep to the tribe, and will make
the Fox's heart glad with a present."
The offer appeared so large for a mere puny girl that the chief
assented at once; and the Fox was content to take a gun, which
proved part of the spoil, for his interest in his captive.
The Indians of Stag's tribe murmured to themselves at this costly
bargain upon the part of their chief. However, they expressed
nothing of this before him, and continued the work of counting and
separating the animals in proportion to the number of each tribe
present--the tribes from the plains being considerably the more
numerous.
Not until four o'clock were they again in motion, when each tribe
started for home.
In three hours' riding they reached the spring, and then the Stag
ordered a small tent of skins to be erected for Ethel's
accommodation.
From this she came out an hour later to gaze upon the great wave of
fire which, kindled at a point far away by their scouts, now swept
along northward, passing at a distance of three or four miles from
the spring.
It was when sitting gravely round the fire later on that the Stag
deigned to enlighten his followers as to his reasons for giving
what seemed to them so great a price for a pale-faced child.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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