Dashing into the thicket, and driving the snarling wolves before him, Mahéga found his worst fears realised, and his horror–struck warriors stood in silence beside the mangled remains of their comrades. The conduct of Indians under such circumstances is uncertain and various as their mood, their impulse, their tribe, and their age. Sometimes they indulge in fearful threats of vengeance; sometimes in the most woeful howlings and lamentations; at others they observe a silence as still as the death which they are contemplating. The Osages, on this occasion, following the example of their leader, spoke not a word, although the sight before them (far too horrible for description) was sufficient to try the strongest nerves; it was chiefly by the immoveable firmness of his character that Mahéga had gained and maintained the despotic influence which he exercised over his followers; neither did it fail him on this occasion, for he proceeded to examine the mutilated remains of his deceased warriors with his usual coolness and sagacity, in order that he might discover by whom the deed had been perpetrated; on a close inspection of the skulls, he found that both had been fractured by a tomahawk blow, which had fallen in a direction almost vertical, but rather at a posterior angle of inclination, whence he immediately inferred that they had been killed by some enemy who had surprised and attacked them from behind, and not in an open fight: after a long and careful observation of the fractures, he was of opinion that they were made by the same weapon. This inference, however, he kept to himself; and directing two of his followers to pay such offices to the dead as were possible under the circumstances, and then to return to the camp, he went forward with the remaining Osage, to satisfy himself as to the manner in which the calamity had occurred: he remembered to have seen Wingenund starting on the trail, and, although he knew him to be bold and active, he could not for an instant entertain the belief that a stripling, wearied with a sleepless night, stiff from being so many hours bound with thongs, and totally unprovided with arms, could have killed his two guards, who were strong, wary, and well–armed men! For some distance Mahéga continued his course in moody silence, the beaten trail affording no indication sufficient to guide him in his conjecture, but at length he reached a place where it crossed a small rivulet, the flat banks of which were sprinkled with a kind of gravelly sand: here he paused and examined every inch of the ground with the eye of a lynx; nor was it long before he detected the foot–prints which he sought, a smaller and a greater, the latter showing longer intervals, and a deeper impression. Rising from his stooping scrutiny, the eyes of the chief glared with fury, as he turned to his follower, and, in a voice almost inarticulate with rage, groaned the hated name of War–Eagle.