The Hidden Children by Robert William Chambers Chapter 6 Page 46

“I come to buy. Sooner or later your young men will put on red paint and oil their bodies. Even now I see your rifles and your hatchets have been polished. Sooner or later the army will move four hundred miles through a wilderness so dark that neither sun nor moon nor stars can penetrate. The old men, the women, the children, and the littlest ones still strapped to the cradle-board, must then remain behind. Is it the truth I speak, my brothers?”

“It is the truth,” they answered very quietly, “Then,” said I, “they will require food and money to buy with. Is it not true, Oneidas?”

“It is true, brother.”

I smiled and turned toward the women who were listening, and who now looked up at me with merry faces.