Everybody has by that time laid in the provisions for the day. Among the Indians the men never work: the women undertake the purchases, the household duties, and the preparation for everything that is indispensable for existence. The men hunt or make war. The payment for what is bought and sold is not effected as among us, by means of coins, which are only accepted by the Indians on the seaboard who traffic with Europeans, but by means of a free exchange, which is carried on by all the tribes residing in the interior of the country. This system is exceedingly simple: the buyer exchanges some object for the one which he wishes to acquire: and nothing more is said.
The two men, after walking right through Garakouaïti, at length reached the lodge of Meli-Antou, in which happened to be Mahiaa, his squaw, whom our readers know as the Indian woman whom the Sayotkatta had placed with General Soto-Mayor's daughters, in order to aid in their conversion to the worship of the Sun. Since the illness of the young ladies she had suspended her visits to the Jouimion Faré, but intended to renew them so soon as she received instructions to that effect.
She was a woman of about thirty years of age, though she looked at least fifty. In these regions, where growth is so rapid, a woman is generally married when she is twelve or thirteen. Continually forced to undertake rude tasks, which in other countries fall to the men, their freshness soon disappears, and on reaching the age of thirty, they are attacked by a precocious decrepitude which, twenty years later, makes hideous and repulsive beings of women who, in their youth, were generally endowed with great beauty and exquisite grace, of which many European ladies might be fairly jealous.
Mahiaa, seated cross-legged on a mat of Indian corn straw, was grinding wheat between two stones. By her side stood two female slaves, belonging to that bastard race to which we have already referred, and to whom the title of savage is applicable. At the moment when Leon entered the lodge, Mahiaa and her women looked up curiously at him.
"Mahiaa," said Meli-Antou to his squaw, as he laid his hand on the captain's shoulder, "this is my brother Cari-Lemon, the great Jagouas of the Huiliches; he will dwell with us."