“I will go and see these United States, and talk with them,” announced Little Thief, majestically. “Their presents have been good, their words sound good. It is unwise to refuse gifts laid upon the prairie. If indeed we have a new father for all the Indians, maybe by listening to his chiefs we can get more from him than we did from our Spanish father. I will go and talk, at the burnt Omaha village. Let the four white men who have come with gifts and a message, seeking brothers-who-have-run-away, be well treated, so that we shall be well treated also.” Then the council broke up. On the outskirts, a boy, Little White Osage, had listened with all his ears. The affair was very interesting. A hot desire filled his heart to go, himself, and see these United States warriors, with their painted boats and their marvelous guns and their black medicine-man and their two chiefs whose hair was different, like his own hair. His own hair was brown and fine instead of being black and coarse, and his eyes were blue instead of black, and his skin, even in its tan, was light instead of dark. Sometimes he was puzzled to remember just how he had come among the Otoes. He did not always feel like an Indian. To be sure, he had been bought from the Osages by the Otoes; but away, ’way back there had been a woman, a light-haired, soft-skinned woman, among the Osages, who had kissed him and hugged him and had taught him a language that he well-nigh had forgotten. Occasionally one of those strange words rose to his lips, but he rarely used it, because the Osages, and now the Otoes, did not wish him to use it. The Otoes called him Little White Osage, as a kind of slur. Nobody kissed him and hugged him, but in their ill-natured moments the Oto squaws beat him, and the children teased him. The squaws never beat the other boys. Antoine, the French trader, was kinder to him. But Antoine had married an Oto woman, and all his children were dark and Indian. “At the burnt Omaha village,” had said Chief Little Thief. Little White Osage knew where this was. The United States chiefs, by their messengers, had invited Little Thief to meet them at the principal Omaha Indian village, so that peace might be made between the Omahas and the Otoes. But the village had been smitten by a sickness――the smallpox, old Antoine had named it, and the frightened Omahas had burned their lodges and had fled, such as were able. Only the site of the village remained, and its graves. It would be of no use to try to go with the chief’s party. They would not want boys, and especially a boy who was not like other Indian boys, and bore a name of the hated Osages. Therefore, this night, in the dusk, he slipped from under his thin blanket in the skin lodge, where slumbered old Antoine and family, and scuttled, bending low, out into the prairie.