essentially English policy of trusting aborigines that they knew of.

In his gloomy self-scrutiny he had often wondered if he ought not to
openly proclaim his kinship with the despised race, but he was always
deterred by the thought of his sister and her husband, as well as by the
persistent doubt whether his advocacy of Indian rights with his fellow
countrymen would be as well served by such a course. And here again he
was perplexed by a singular incident of his early missionary efforts
which he had at first treated with cold surprise, but to which later
reflection had given a new significance. After Gray Eagle's revelation
he had made a pilgrimage to the Indian country to verify the statements
regarding his dead father,--the Indian chief Silver Cloud. Despite
the confusion of tribal dialects he was amazed to find that the Indian
tongue came back to him almost as a forgotten boyish memory, so that
he was soon able to do without an interpreter; but not until that
functionary, who knew his secret, appeared one day as a more significant
ambassador. "Gray Eagle says if you want truly to be a brother to his
people you must take a wife among them. He loves you--take one of his!"
Peter, through whose veins--albeit of mixed blood--ran that Puritan ice
so often found throughout the Great West, was frigidly amazed. In
vain did the interpreter assure him that the wife in question, Little
Daybreak, was a wife only in name, a prudent reserve kept by Gray
Eagle in the orphan daughter of a brother brave. But Peter was adamant.
Whatever answer the interpreter returned to Gray Eagle he never knew.
But to his alarm he presently found that the Indian maiden Little
Daybreak had been aware of Gray Eagle's offer, and had with pathetic
simplicity already considered herself Peter's spouse. During his stay
at the encampment he found her sitting before his lodge every morning.
A girl of sixteen in years, a child of six in intellect, she flashed
her little white teeth upon him when he lifted his tent flap, content