Chapter 64 - Page 2

of a scene once witnessed in a pioneer village on
the western bank of the Mississippi. Not far from this village,
where the stumps of aboriginal trees yet stand in the market-
place, some years ago lived a portion of the remnant tribes of
the Sioux Indians, who frequently visited the white settlements
to purchase trinkets and cloths.

One florid crimson evening in July, when the red-hot sun was
going down in a blaze, and I was leaning against a corner in my
huntsman's frock, lo! there came stalking out of the crimson West
a gigantic red-man, erect as a pine, with his glittering
tomahawk, big as a broad-ax, folded in martial repose across his
chest, Moodily wrapped in his blanket, and striding like a king
on the stage, he promenaded up and down the rustic streets,
exhibiting on the back of his blanket a crowd of human hands,
rudely delineated in red; one of them seemed recently drawn.

"Who is this warrior?" asked I; "and why marches he here? and for
what are these bloody hands?"

"That warrior is the _Red-Hot Coal_," said a pioneer in moccasins,
by my side. "He marches here to show-off his last trophy; every
one of those hands attests a foe scalped by his tomahawk; and he
has just emerged from Ben Brown's, the painter, who has sketched
the last red hand that you see; for last night this _Red-Hot Coal_
outburned the _Yellow Torch_, the chief of a band of the Foxes."

Poor savage thought I; and is this the cause of your lofty gait?
Do you straighten yourself to think that you have committed a
murder, when a chance-falling stone has often done the same? Is
it a proud thing to topple down six feet perpendicular of immortal
manhood, though that lofty living tower needed perhaps thirty good
growing summers to bring it to maturity? Poor savage! And you account
it so glorious, do you, to mutilate and destroy what God himself was
more than a quarter of a century in building?

And yet, fellow-Christians, what is the American frigate Macedonian,
or the English frigate President, but as two bloody red hands painted
on this poor savage's blanket?

Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet
visited this poor pagan planet of ours, to civilise civilisation and
christianise Christendom?