The bear and deer speak to me with tongues I do not understand.

_Ma mere! ma mere_! I must know whether I am a Delaware or pale face!--whether one or the other, I am still yours--yours always! Speak! speak with a straight tongue to your child!" "Ough! ough! ough!" groaned the old woman, looking at him wistfully, and plainly struggling with herself--hesitating between two courses.
"Speak!" said Verty, with a glow in his eye, which made him resemble a young leopard of the wild--"speak, _ma mere_!--I am no longer a child! I go into a new land now, and how shall it be?
As a red face, or a long knife--which am I?
Speak, _ma mere_--say if I am a Delaware, whose place is the woods, or a white, whose life must take him from the deer forever!" The struggle was ended; Verty could not have uttered words more fatal to his discovering anything.

He raised an insuperable barrier to any revelations--if, indeed, there existed any mystery--by his alternative.

Was he a Delaware, and thus doomed to live in the forest with his old Indian mother--or was he a white, in which case, he would leave her?
Pride, cunning, above all, deep and pure affection, sealed the old woman's lips, if she had thought of opening them.

She looked for sometime at Verty, then, taking his head between her hands, she said, with eyes full of tears: "You are my own dear son--my young, beautiful hawk of the woods--who said you were not a true Delaware!" And the old woman bent down, and with a look of profound affection, pressed her lips to Verty's forehead.
The young man's face assumed an expression of mingled gloom and doubt, and he sighed.