Moran,
The Trapper, Having Been Absent For A Day Or Two, Had Returned, It
Seemed, Bringing All His Family With Him.
He had taken to himself a
wife for whom he had paid the established price of one horse.
This
looks cheap at first sight, but in truth the purchase of a squaw is a
transaction which no man should enter into without mature
deliberation, since it involves not only the payment of the first
price, but the formidable burden of feeding and supporting a
rapacious horde of the bride's relatives, who hold themselves
entitled to feed upon the indiscreet white man. They gather round
like leeches, and drain him of all he has.
Moran, like Reynal, had not allied himself to an aristocratic circle.
His relatives occupied but a contemptible position in Ogallalla
society; for among those wild democrats of the prairie, as among us,
there are virtual distinctions of rank and place; though this great
advantage they have over us, that wealth has no part in determining
such distinctions. Moran's partner was not the most beautiful of her
sex, and he had the exceedingly bad taste to array her in an old
calico gown bought from an emigrant woman, instead of the neat and
graceful tunic of whitened deerskin worn ordinarily by the squaws.
The moving spirit of the establishment, in more senses than one, was
a hideous old hag of eighty. Human imagination never conceived
hobgoblin or witch more ugly than she. You could count all her ribs
through the wrinkles of the leathery skin that covered them.
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