When morning came, Narrhetoba, one of the chiefs of the Sioux, appeared before the white men, asked for their calumet, filled it with his own tobacco, and smoked it in their presence. Henceforth he was their friend, despite the wiles of the old chief Aquipaguetin. Taking to their canoes that day, the party with the three white captives paddled upstream toward the home of the Sioux.

Each day at dawn an old man roused the braves with a cry, and before taking up the day’s paddling they scoured the neighborhood for enemies. For nearly three weeks they were on the way before they drew near to the Falls of St. Anthony. Time and again the old chief, mourning over his son’s unavenged death, threatened to kill the whites; then with covetous fingers he would gather up the gifts with which he made them buy their lives. Carrying with him constantly the bones of a dead friend, wrapped in skins decorated with the quills of porcupines, he would often lay this bundle before the captives and demand that they cover the bones with presents in honor of the dead.

As they journeyed the old chief would at times break out into a fierce temper and vow the destruction of the three strangers. But on such occasions he would be restrained by the other chiefs, who realized that if they killed these white men no more traders would come to the Sioux country bringing merchandise and guns—which they spoke of as “the iron possessed by an evil spirit.”

The Sioux watched the curious ways of Friar Hennepin, and when they saw him looking upon an open book and moving his lips in muttered words they were almost on the point of killing him—for surely he was a sorcerer conversing under his breath with an evil spirit that might be persuaded any moment to kill them all. Ako and the Picard, seeing the effect of the friar’s devotions, urged him to leave off such dangerous practices. But the stubborn Hennepin, instead of muttering his holy offices, now fell to singing from the book in a loud and cheerful voice, much to the relief of the Indians who feared this far less than the mumbled undertones.

At last they left the river not far from the Falls of St. Anthony and hurried away northward toward the villages that lay in the region of the broad Mille Lac, the long-limbed Sioux covering the ground with great speed. They waded streams covered by a coat of ice from the frost of the night before. Neither Ako nor the Picard could swim, and so they often passed over on the backs of the Sioux. Hennepin was not built for speed, and the Indians, impatient at his slow progress, set fire to the prairie behind him and then, taking his hands, hurried the frightened man of prayer ahead of the licking flames. When they came to the first village the war party finally separated, each Sioux going to his own home town.

The poor Picard, unable to conceal his growing fears, had roused the quick contempt of the Sioux, who seized him with no gentle hands, for they saw in him a coward deserving of no such respect as they willingly bestowed upon his sterner friend Ako. He should be treated like an ordinary Indian captive. So they painted his head and face with different colors, fastened a tuft of feathers in his hair, placed in his hand a gourd filled with small round stones, and made him sing shaking his rattle in the air to keep time to the music.

Yet like the tribes of the Illinois Valley, the Sioux were a hospitable people. They fed the white men with fish and with wild rice, seasoned with blueberries, and served upon dishes made of birch bark. Then they proceeded to divide among themselves such supplies as still remained in the hands of the white men. Three chieftains, moreover, living in as many villages, adopted the three prisoners and carried them off to their homes. Perhaps Ako was not sorry to part with the friar, for the boastful ways of Hennepin had sorely tried his patience.

It was the old chief Aquipaguetin who adopted Hennepin into his own family to take the place of the son he had lost. He gave the friar a great robe of ten beaver skins, trimmed with porcupine quills, and bade his half-dozen Indian wives treat him as a chieftain’s............