The Lodges Were Already Pitched, Five In
Number, By The Side Of The Stream.
The woman lay in one of them,
reduced to a mere skeleton.
For some time she had been unable to
move or speak. Indeed, nothing had kept her alive but the hope of
seeing Henry, to whom she was strongly and faithfully attached. No
sooner did he enter the lodge than she revived, and conversed with
him the greater part of the night. Early in the morning she was
lifted into a travail, and the whole party set out toward our camp.
There were but five warriors; the rest were women and children. The
whole were in great alarm at the proximity of the Crow war party, who
would certainly have destroyed them without mercy had they met. They
had advanced only a mile or two, when they discerned a horseman, far
off, on the edge of the horizon. They all stopped, gathering
together in the greatest anxiety, from which they did not recover
until long after the horseman disappeared; then they set out again.
Henry was riding with Shaw a few rods in advance of the Indians, when
Mahto-Tatonka, a younger brother of the woman, hastily called after
them. Turning back, they found all the Indians crowded around the
travail in which the woman was lying. They reached her just in time
to hear the death-rattle in her throat. In a moment she lay dead in
the basket of the vehicle. A complete stillness succeeded; then the
Indians raised in concert their cries of lamentation over the corpse,
and among them Shaw clearly distinguished those strange sounds
resembling the word "Halleluyah," which together with some other
accidental coincidences has given rise to the absurd theory that the
Indians are descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel.
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