He was laughing in his quiet
way. He had shot the Colonel of the Swiss Guards through his cockade.
Three days afterwards, as the gallant frigate, the "Repudiator," was
sailing out of Brest Harbor, the gigantic form of an Indian might be
seen standing on the binnacle in conversation with Commodore Bowie, the
commander of the noble ship. It was Tatua, the Chief of the Nose-rings.
II.
Leatherlegs and Tom Coxswain did not accompany Tatua when he went to the
Parisian metropolis on a visit to the father of the French pale-faces.
Neither the Legs nor the Sailor cared for the gayety and the crowd of
cities; the stout mariner's home was in the puttock-shrouds of the old
"Repudiator." The stern and simple trapper loved the sound of the waters
better than the jargon of the French of the old country. "I can follow
the talk of a Pawnee," he said, "or wag my jaw, if so be necessity bids
me to speak, by a Sioux's council-fire and I can patter Canadian
French with the hunters who come for peltries to Nachitoches or
Thichimuchimachy; but from the tongue of a Frenchwoman, with white flour
on her head, and war-paint on her face, the Lord deliver poor Natty
Pumpo."
"Amen and amen!" said Tom Coxswain. "There was a woman in our
aft-scuppers when I went a-whalin in the little 'Grampus'--and Lord love
you, Pumpo, you poor land-swab, she WAS as pretty a craft as ever dowsed
a tarpauling--there was a woman on board the 'Grampus,' who before we'd
struck our first fish, or biled our first blubber, set the whole crew in
a mutiny.
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