Explore "The Trappers of Arkansas" by Gustave Aimard on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Indians and wood rangers have two languages, of which they make use by turns, according to circumstances -- spoken language, and the language of gestures.
Like the spoken language, the language of signs has, in America, infinite fluctuations; everyone, so to say, invents his own. It is a compound of strange and mysterious gestures, a kind of masonic telegraph, the signs of which, varying at will, are only comprehensible to a small number of adepts.