The latter had put all the interrogatories his ingenuity and practice could suggest, concerning the state of the tribe of the Loups, their crops, their store of provisions for the ensuing winter, and their relations with their different warlike neighbours without extorting any answer, which, in the slightest degree, elucidated the cause of his finding a solitary warrior so far from his people.
(The reader will remember that, while he spoke to the native warrior in his own tongue, he necessarily addressed his white companions in English.) "The Loups and the light- fac'd Red-skins are again friends.
The Loups are famous for their horses, and it is often that you see a warrior on the prairies far better mounted, than a congress-man in the settlements.
"It is far to the village of the Loups," he said, stretching his arm in a direction contrary to that in which, the trapper well knew, the tribe dwelt, "and the road is crooked.
"If I lead my daughters to the doors of the Loups, will the women take them by the hand; and will the warriors smoke with my young men?"
--Do not the Omahaws visit the Loups, when the tomahawk is buried in the path between the two nations?"
"And the Yanktons, and the burnt-wood Tetons, who live in the elbow of the river, 'with muddy water,' do they not come into the lodges of the Loups and smoke?"
But the people from the rising sun are not Siouxes, and they wish to visit the lodges of the Loups."