There was more added; we record only enough to indicate the direction of Listening Crane’s aim.  The eye of Raging Buffalo was opened to see a vision:  the daughter of the Natchez sitting in majesty, clothed in many-colored robes of shining feathers crossed and recrossed with girdles of serpent-skins and of wampum, her feet in quilled and painted moccasins, her head under a glory of plumes, the carpet of buffalo-robes about her throne covered with the trophies of conquest, and the atmosphere of her lodge blue with the smoke of embassadors’ calumets; and this extravagant dream the capricious chief at once resolved should eventually become reality.  “Let her be taken to the village temple,” he said to his prime-minister, “and be fed by warriors on the flesh of wolves.”

The Listening Crane was a patient man; he was the “man that waits” of the old French proverb; all things came to him.  He had waited for an opportunity to change his brother’s mind, and it had come.  Again, he waited for him to die; and, like Methuselah and others, he died.  He had heard of a race more powerful than the Natchez—­a white race; he waited for them; and when the year 1682 saw a humble “black gown” dragging and splashing his way, with La Salle and Tonti, through the swamps of Louisiana, holding forth the crucifix and backed by French carbines and Mohican tomahawks, among the marvels of that wilderness was found this:  a child of nine sitting, and—­with some unostentatious aid from her medicine-man—­ruling; queen of her tribe and high-priestess of their temple.  Fortified by the acumen and self-collected ambition of Listening Crane, confirmed in her regal title by the white man’s Manitou through the medium of the “black gown,” and inheriting her father’s fear-compelling frown, she ruled with majesty and wisdom, sometimes a decreer of bloody justice, sometimes an Amazonian counselor of warriors, and at all times—­year after year, until she had reached the perfect womanhood of twenty-six—­a virgin queen.

On the 11th of March, 1699, two overbold young Frenchmen of M. D’Iberville’s little exploring party tossed guns on shoulder, and ventured away from their canoes on the bank of the Mississippi into the wilderness.  Two men they were whom an explorer would have been justified in hoarding up, rather than in letting out at such risks; a pair to lean on, noble and strong.  They hunted, killed nothing, were overtaken by rain, then by night, hunger, alarm, despair.

And when they had lain down to die, and had only succeeded in falling asleep, the Diana of the Tchoupitoulas, ranging the magnolia groves with bow and quiver, came upon them in all the poetry of their hope-forsaken strength and beauty, and fell sick of love.  We say not whether with Zephyr Grandissime or Epaminondas Fusilier; that, for the time being, was her secret.