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law, Mohataha's son, Ikkemotubbe)) -looked on, watched: the in–
scrutable ageless wrinkled face, the fat shapeless body dressed in
the cast-off garments of a French queen, which on her looked like
the Sunday costume of the madame of a rich Natchez or New Or–
leans brothel, sitting in a battered wagon inside a squatting ring
of her household troops, her young men dressed in their Sunday
clothes for traveling too: then she said, 'Where is this Indian terri–
tory?' And they told her: West. 'Tum the mules west,' she said,
and someone did so, and she took the pen from the agent and made
her X on the paper and handed the pen back and the wagon moved,
the young men rising too, and she vanished across that summer after–
noon to that terrific and infinitesimal creak and creep of ungreased
wheels, herself immobile beneath the rigid parasol, grotesque and
regal, bizarre and moribund, like obsolescence's self riding off the
stage its own obsolete catafalque, looking not once back, not once
back toward home) ;
But most of all, the prints of men-the fitted shoes which Doctor
Habersham and Louis Grenier had brought from the Atlantic sea–
board, the cavalry boots in which Alec Holston had ridden behind
Francis Marion, and- more myriad almost than leaves, outnumber–
ing all the others lumped together- the moccasins, the deerhide san–
dals of the forest, worn not by the Indians but by white men, the
pioneers, the long hunters, as though they had not only vanquished
the wilderness but had even stepped into the very footgear of them
they dispossessed (and mete and fitting so, since it was by means of
his feet and legs that the white man conquered America; the closed
and split U's of his horses and cattle overlay his own prints always,
merely consolidating
his
victory) ;- (the jail) watched them all, red
men and white and black-the pioneers, the hunters, the forest men
with rifles, who made the same light rapid soundless toed-in almost
heelless prints as the red men they dispossessed and who in fact dis–
possessed the red men for that reason: not because of the grooved bar–
rel but because they could enter the red man's milieu and make the
same footprints that he made; the husbandman printing deep the
hard heels of his brogans because of the weight he bore on
his
shoulders: axe and saw and plow-stock, who dispossessed the forest
man for the obverse reason: because with his saw and axe he sim-
