326 TRAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND SPORT. 



habit, and education ; but he was neither blood- 

 thirsty nor cruel. Under other circumstances, and in 

 a civilised land, he might have been a hero, a bene- 

 factor of thousands or millions of his fellow-creatures ; 

 but in his wild condition, despised, goaded, and in- 

 sulted as he felt himself, his better feelings blunted, 

 and his whole nature soured by real and fancied 

 injuries, what wonder was it that he raised his knife 

 even against his own daughter, entering the hut as 

 he did with the full persuasion that the young man 

 she had sheltered was a spy and emissary of his 

 bitterest foes? 



The account given of himself by the midshipman, 

 and the imputations cast by him on the chief of the 

 Salt Lake, as Lafitte was called by the Indians, re- 

 ceived strong confirmation from two handbills, which 

 Tokeah, who had learned to read English in the 

 course of his long intercourse with the white men, 

 had torn, during his recent expedition, from a wall 

 in one of the new Louisianian settlements. One of 

 these papers was a proclamation by the authorities 

 of Louisiana, enumerating the crimes and cruelties 

 of the pirate of Barataria, and offering a reward of 

 five hundred dollars for his head. The other was 

 an address to the citizens of the State, summoning 

 them to the defence of their country against the 

 British. Notwithstanding this corroborative evi- 

 dence of the correctness of his daughter's statement, 

 Tokeah, unwilling to remain with the smallest doubt 



