THE SECOND KISS

Peculiar title, you may say, for a frontier tale that begins with the slaughter of a wagon train and the abduction of its lone survivor by a savage of the Blackfoot nation. But no, the savage, Nakoa, happens to be a very desirable prince and happens furthermore to have taken the unprecedented step of adopting a white woman as his Nitsokan, or totem sign. And the lone survivor, Maria Frank, happens to be a spirited and maddeningly beautiful (even the Indians say so) 19 yearold virgin. There follows an exquisitely prolonged erotic fantasy, complicated by girlish coyness and bravish pride, a sadistically lustful rival warrior, not to mention rival war parties, and an intertribal marriage contract that Nakoa's obliged to honor. Language lessons and Indian folkways are not too distractingly interspersed and there is a lot of flap about the Blackfoot philosophy of acceptance, though what we're urged to accept is the same old paleface ""sweet agony.