the level of the little canyon. The wigwams had been pitched either
side of the old overgrown road. Children had cut away the slight
underbrush to clear a round smooth park of perhaps thirty yards
diameter, in the circumference of which were crowded the persons and
household belongings of four score people. Near the centre stood the
chief's lodge distinguished by a shield and spear. The whole was a
facsimile of a plains camp, except that here the whole affair was in
miniature--little wigwams, little kettle-tripods, little space--for the
camp was but temporary. Perhaps a score of men were idling about,
dressed in blue overalls and old flannel shirts. Moccasins and no hats
left still a slight flavor of savagery. The women were clothed for the
most part in dirty calico prints. The children had on just nothing at
all.
Lafond cursed a little excitedly as he became aware of this not
unpicturesque gathering. It was plainly out of the question to leave
his horses and wagon in the creek bottom as he had intended; and it was
now equally impossible to waylay the prospectors at the top of the
grade. A shot would bring out the entire band. The situation was much
complicated, for just beyond lay the rolling treeless foothills. More
bad luck!
Still the half-breed remembered it was yet many miles to Rapid; and an
ambush would not be impossible in some one of the numerous gullies that
seamed the foothills. He must hurry his tired horses up the steep
slope in order to emerge on the main road ahead of Knapp and Buckley.
"How!" said the nearest warrior, raising his hand palm outward.
"How!" replied Lafond gravely.
He drove on through the half-obliterated road, responding to the
conventional salutations of those on the right and on the left. Near
the further side of the little clearing, a tiny copper-colored boy rose
from the grass and scurried across in front of the horses, so near that
Lafond had to pull up sharply to keep from running over him. An old
woman, evidently its nurse, hurried to catch him. When she came to the
road, however, she stopped short, and stared at Black Mike wildly, and
began to scream out in the language of the Brule Sioux.
"'Tis he, the Defiler! 'Tis he!"
She was an unkempt, wild old hag, and Lafond thought her mad. Her face
was lined deeply, as only an Indian's face ever is; a few ragged wisps
of gray hair fell over her eyes; and her skinny arm showed that she was
thin almost to emaciation.
At her scream a warrior arose before the chief's lodge and approached.
From all directions the other warriors gathered. Two of the younger
men had already taken the horses by the bits. Lafond did not
understand it, and was about to expostulate vigorously against what he
thought was intended robbery until he saw the face of the chieftain,
who now drew near. Then he turned cold to the marrow.
The chief looked him in the face for almost a minute.
"It is not so," he said quietly.
The hag had ceased her cries when the two young men had grasped the
horses' bits.
"It is so, O Lone Wolf," she replied with respect. "The form is
changed by the hand of Manitou, but the spirit is the same, and I know
it in his eyes. It is the Defiler."
"Let Rippling Water be sought," responded the savage, still without
excitement.
About him the old-time dignity clung as a mantle. To any one in a less
desperate situation than Michail Lafond there would have been something
strangely incongruous and a little pathetic in this contrast between
the manner of the old wild plains savage and the habit of the modern
ward of the government. Even he was cool enough to see that the once
powerful tribe had sadly shrunk in numbers and in wealth.
After a moment the woman called by the name of Rippling Water appeared
from a distance, where she had been cutting birch bark. In the
syllables of the beautiful name Lafond had recognized that of the
second of his Indian wives; in the prematurely aged withered squaw who
now approached he recognized nothing.
"My daughter," said Lone Wolf, "look upon this man. Have you seen him
ever?"
She peered at him a moment through short-sighted eyes.
"I have lain on his bosom," she answered simply.
"It is----?"
"It is the Defiler," she replied.
XXXVI
UNDER THE ETERNAL STARS
After the massacre at the battle of the Little Big Horn, a vast number
of Indian refugees fled over the borders into Canada. There they
dwelt, drawing three pounds of beef a day from arbitrary uniformed
individuals, who were strangely lacking in sympathy, and very observant
of the few rules and regulations which a mysterious White Mother over
the sea had seen fit to impose. Three pounds of meat a day is not
much. Still it is enough to get along on, and with the necessity, and
indeed, the opportunity of the chase gone, the bucks were able to wax
lazy, drunken, and generally shiftless to their hearts' content. All
this was frowned on by the uniformed individuals, but opportunities
were not far to seek.
There has never been a nation more warlike, brave, and hardy than the
Sioux in its native environment of war and hunting. These two
furnished every point of leverage--physical, moral, intellectual--which
the savage required to lift him to the level of his greatest
efficiency. From the buffalo itself the Sioux family obtained its
supply of wigwams, robes, food, fuel, light, harness, bow-strings,
instruments of industry--in fact almost every article of necessity or
luxury appertaining to its everyday life. From the chase of the animal
the young Dacotah learned to ride, to shoot, to risk his life. And
then in his constant strife with his neighbors, the Blackfeet or the
Crows or the Pawnees, he was forced, if he would survive, to develop to
the last degree his cunning, his observation, his strategy, his
resourcefulness, his patience, his power to endure, his personal
courage. Habituated to these two, the chase and war, from his early
youth, he came at last to be the coolest, most dangerous warrior of the
plains. He could ride anything, bareback, in any position. With his
short, powerful bow he could launch a half-dozen arrows into the air
before the first reached the ground, or could drive one of his shafts
quite through the body of a buffalo. When necessity required, he was
brave to the point of recklessness; but again, when expediency advised,
he could worm his way for miles through the scantiest cover, flat on
his face, by the laborious use alone of his elbows and toes. He could
read a whole history in a trail which another might not even
distinguish. He could sit absolutely motionless for hours in the
hottest sun or the bitterest cold. And he could bear, as he was often
called upon to do, the severest physical pain without a quiver of the
eyelid.
But when the buffalo vanished, the Sioux passed the meridian of his
powers. No other means of subsistence offered. He was forced to
plunder, or go to the reservation for Government beef. Thence came
much whisky and much loafing. The new young man had not the training
of his father. So, in a little, the Teton nation was subdued and
brought to reservations, and herded in an
overall-plug-hat-blanket-wearing multitude, even now but half-tamed,
and fiercely instinct with hereditary ferocity and resourcefulness.
Other Indians go to Carlisle, learn to plough, and become at least
partially civilized. The Sioux, fierce, hawk-eyed, wide-nostrilled,
sits in solitary dignity before his lodge, brooding. Occasionally he
has to be rounded up with a Gatling, as witness Wounded Knee. I have
never been able to envy the agents of Dakota reservations.
When the statute of limitations ran out, or whatever mysterious
time-limit the Government puts on its displeasure against Indian
murderers, Sitting Bull and a horde of his fellow-warriors came back.
Sitting Bull joined Buffalo Bill's show, where he had a good time until
he began ghost-dancing and was killed in the Wounded Knee campaign.
But some, Lone Wolf's band among them, remained in Canada. They had
various reasons for doing so.
Lone Wolf stayed because he was in hard luck. He had barely settled
down in his new home before the great Manitou had seen fit to strike
his children with the Spotted Sickness. When finally the last case had
been buried hastily, and its clothes and belongings burned under the
distant eye of the uniformed man, the formerly powerful band found
itself reduced by almost half. By dint of sitting innumerable days
naked in a circle on the prairie and beating a tom-tom until the agent
prayed for rain, the survivors managed to secure for themselves
immunity from the Spotted Sickness at least. Then some of the ponies
were stolen. Then a schism occurred in the community; and Three Knives
took with him a dozen families and established a new clan within plain
sight of the old. Lone Wolf was powerless because of the uniformed
individual, who frowned on the Indian idea of patriarchal chastisement.
A very young man of the band killed the agent, hoping thus to earn
praise, but almost before the embers were cold and before the scalp of
Three Knives had clotted dry, there appeared an astounding number of
uniforms, who promptly decimated Lone Wolf's warriors and took away all
their arms. Lone Wolf discovered that these uniformed men were in
reality nothing but soldiers--a disgusting fact which he had not before
suspected. They hung six of his young men, and that night a number of
things happened, such as the unprovoked fall of Lone Wolf's standard
from over his lodge, which showed plainly that Gitche Manitou was still
angry.
Lone Wolf gathered his remnants about him and journeyed south to
Spotted Tail.
There he enjoyed the discontented tranquillity of a United States
reservation, with occasional privileges if he was good.
Lone Wolf had gone into the north country at the head of three hundred
efficient fighting men, well armed with rifles, rich in ammunition,
ponies, and the luxuries of daily existence. He came back as the
nominal chief of thirty-five warriors, with few firearms, and less
wealth. Counting in the women, children, and old men, his original
band had numbered nearly a thousand souls--a large camp even for the
old days. Now there remained barely a tenth of that number.
Misfortunes such as these must have a reason. Gitche Manitou is stern,
but he is not unjust. Everybody knows that. And the reason Lone
Wolf's band was so afflicted, Big Thunder, the medicine man, had
discovered, lay in the fact that the defiling of the tribe's token,
after the Little Big Horn, had been done by a member of the tribe
itself. Until the culprit should be brought to justice the wrath of
Gitche Manitou would continue to be visited impartially on the entire
band.
The recognition of Rippling Water made a profound impression on those
standing about. There flashed into Lone Wolf's eagle face a gleam of
satisfaction so intense that Black Mike started. He had not the
remotest notion that he was in any actual danger, for his dealings with
the tribe in those old times when he had been a member of it had always
been rather to its advantage than to his own. That it was unfriendly
to him because of his unceremonious desertion of it, he did not doubt.
Nor did he hope to escape a typical Indian tirade from the two old hags
who, so short a time ago, had been his not unattractive young wives.
But beyond this, and perhaps--as he glanced over the motley indications
of their poverty--the promise of gifts, he anticipated nothing more
serious in the end than a delay. A delay, however, was what he could
not at present afford.
"Ah, well," he acknowledged in the Indian tongue, "I am he,
Man-who-speaks-Medicine. You have known me. It is I. It is many
moons that I have not seen my brothers, but I have accomplished many
things, and I have gathered gifts for my brothers which will rejoice
their hearts. I go to the lodges of the white men near Swift-water
now, and I haste; so I cannot linger to clasp my brothers' hands; but
to-morrow I return bearing the gifts."
[Illustration: "MY LITTLE MOLLY," HE CHOKED.]
He took up his reins with all confidence, for in those days no one was
afraid of Indians--at least when they were accompanied by their women
and children. The two bucks at the horses' heads did not move,
however; and at a signal from Lone Wolf three others leaped lightly
into the wagon-body behind the half-breed and pinned his arms to his
sides. So suddenly was it done that Lafond could not even struggle.
His captors tied his elbows together at the back and lifted him to the
ground, where a number of others hustled him into a wigwam, and after
tying his feet left him lying on the ground. In a moment he heard the
faint sound of wheels somewhere above him, by which he knew that Billy
Knapp and Buckley were passing the point of his intended ambush. He
drew a deep breath and shouted. Instantly two young Sioux ran in and
threw a blanket over his head, nearly smothering him. The sound of the
wheels died into distance.
After perhaps two hours he heard the hoof-beats of a large party of
horsemen. They, too, died away. The men composing the party were
looking for him, Michail Lafond, but this he did not know. He tried to
distinguish from the noises just outside what was taking place in the
little camp, but he could not.
At the end of another half-hour the two young men who had been
appointed as his guards led him out to a horse, on which, after his
feet had been untied, he was compelled to mount. He asked them
questions, to which they vouchsafed no reply. Looking about him
curiously, he saw that the camp had been struck. The long teepee
poles, bound on each side of the ponies, trailed their ends on the
ground, and on the litters thus formed, the skins of the lodges, all
the household utensils, and many of the younger children had been
placed. Squaws bestrode the little animals. The warriors,
ridiculously incongruous in their overalls and flannel shirts, sat
motionless on their mounts. Lafond recognized his own team, but could
not discover either his wagon or the harness. These had been dragged
away into the bushes and left, for very good reasons.
The cavalcade took its way directly down the narrow, overgrown little
canyon, riding in single file. Lafond could not understand this. The
road above would have been much easier.
After an hour's hard work in dodging obstructions, getting around
fallen trees or between standing timber, the party emerged on the
broad, rolling foothills, grass-covered and bare of trees. Here Lone
Wolf led the way south-east for several miles, and finally came to a
halt on the brow of a round hill of gentle descent. The band at once
dismounted. A number of the squaws deftly relieved the ponies of their
burdens, and the younger boys led them away to the bottom-lands for
pasture. The women then began without delay to erect the lodges in a
wide circle surrounding the brow of the hill, so arranging them that
the flaps or doorways opened into the common centre. After this had
been done, they built in the middle of the circle a huge fire of wood
brought from the Hills, but did not light it as yet. Then all silently
disappeared to the bottom-lands, where they made little fires and set
about supper.
Before each lodge a warrior established himself, crosslegged, and began
to smoke. When the sun dipped behind the Hills and threw their long
shadows silently out across to the Bad Lands, the chill of twilight
struck in, and so the Indians wrapped themselves closely in their
blankets. As by a stroke of enchantment, with the concealment of the
shirts and overalls, the Past returned. Against the sky of evening,
the silhouettes of the pointed wigwams and the suggestion of the
shrouded warriors smoking solemnly, silently, their pipes, all belonged
to the nomadic age before such men as Michail Lafond had "civilized"
the country.
After a time they rose and departed silently to the bottom-land for a
while, leaving Lafond in charge of the two young men. They had gone to
eat their suppers. The half-breed had not tasted food since the early
morning, nor slept for thirty odd hours.
The stars came out one by one, and the stillness of that great inland
sea men call the prairies fell on the world. Such occasional sounds as
rose from the creek bottom seemed but to emphasize the peace. And then
suddenly, from the shadows somewhere, without disturbance, the
blanketed figures appeared and took their places again. A squaw came
bearing a torch, and lit the fire in the centre of the circle, and
there sprang up a broad shaft of light which drew about the little
scene a great canopy of imminent blackness. From hand to hand passed a
great red-stone calumet or pipe. Each warrior puffed at it twice and
passed it to his neighbor. It was not offered to Michail Lafond, whose
bonds had now been loosened.
After each of the seated warriors had taken his part in this ceremony,
and the pipe had completed the circle to Lone Wolf, that chief arose,
throwing back his blanket from his shoulders.
With a sudden chill of fear, Michail Lafond saw that he was to assist
at a state council of the sort held only when the tribe is to sit in
judgment on one of its own number.
The savage was naked to the waist. In his hair, worn loose and
unbraided after the Sioux fashion, three eagle feathers with white tips
were thrust slantwise across the back of his head; and under its heavy
mass his fierce bright eyes and hawk face gleamed impressively. About
his neck hung a fringe of bears' claws, from which depended a round
silver medal. Now as he stood there--the lithe strength of his bronze
torso revealed one arm clasping the blanket about his waist, the other
holding loosely at his side the feather-bedecked calumet of
sandstone--the stigma of sordidness and drunkenness and squalor seemed
to fall away, so that the spectator would have seen in this group of
silent men under the silent western heavens only the pomp and pride of
a great and savage people in the zenith of its power.
Lone Wolf stood for the space of several minutes without a sign. Then
with a magnificently sweeping gesture he held the calumet aloft and
began to speak.
At first his voice was low and monotonous, but as his speech continued
it took on more color, until at the close it responded in modulation to
every flash of his eye. He began with a recital of the tribe's ancient
glory, dwelling rather on concrete examples than on broader
generalities. He numbered its warriors, its ponies, its arms, and
lodges. He told of the beauty of its women and the greatness of its
men, whom he ran over by name. He told of its deeds in war,
enumerating the enemies it had struck, the ponies it had stolen, the
stratagems it had conceived and carried out. And then he swept his arm
and the feather-fluttering calumet abroad as he described the boundless
extent of the hunting grounds over which it had used to roam. As he
continued, the warriors' expressive eyes brightened and flashed with
pride, though they moved not one muscle of their faces or bodies.
Beyond the circle could be dimly descried another not less interested
audience of women and older children.
"These and more were ours!" cried Lone Wolf, "these and many more. The
favor of Gitche Manitou was ours and the riches of the world. Where
are they now?" With an indescribably graceful gesture the orator
stooped to the ground and grasped a handful of the loose dry earth.
"Gone!" he said solemnly, letting the sand fall from his outstretched
suddenly opened palm.
Then, without pause or transition, he began, in equally vivid objective
language, to detail the tribe's misery and poverty of to-day. He
recounted its disasters, just as a moment before he had recounted its
victories. He told of the Spotted Sickness, the dividing of forces,
the battle with the red coats, all the long series of oppressions great
and little which had brought them to their present condition. He
counted over by name the present members, to show how their numbers had
shrunken, and to each name he added others of those who had gone
before. So real was the picture that the orator himself faltered,
while from outside the circle rose for a single instant a long
trembling wail. The warriors had half covered their faces with the
folds of their blankets.
"Thus our glory went and our young men are seen no longer on the war
path, but only in the white men's towns. And yet our fathers were
brave before us and we have struck well in our time. Why is this so?
Why has Gitche Manitou veiled his face from his children?"
Leaving the question unanswered, Lone Wolf unexpectedly took up
Lafond's connection with the tribe. In the recounting of this, too, he
held to the greatest minuteness of detail, showing plainly the
half-breed's rise from despised squaw man to a person of influence in
the councils. He gave the half-breed full credit for all he did. He
even went out of his way to show that to Lafond was due much of the
power that had so distinguished the Brule Sioux among the other tribes.
He described again briefly that power, and told of the battle of the
Little Big Horn. He dwelt on that as to some extent the culmination of
the tribe's glory. It was the last and greatest of its exploits.
After it misfortune commenced. Gitche Manitou that day veiled his face.
"And he turned his hand against the totem of the Turtle," said Lone
Wolf impressively, "because one of its children had committed a
sacrilege. The very night of that great victory, a brave from among us
arose and took the sacred totem, the great Turtle, from the lodge of
his chief, and slew Buffalo Voice, the medicine man favored of Gitche
Manitou, and defiled the totem.
"From that time Gitche Manitou has frowned upon his children. From
that time misfortune has visited the tribe of Lone Wolf. From that
time the man who did these things has lost his old warrior name and has
been known as the Defiler."
He paused and looked about the circle until his eye rested on Lafond.
With a sudden fierce enmity he stretched his arm toward the captive.
"That is he," he concluded impressively; "and it has been revealed by
Big Thunder that never will Gitche Manitou smile on his children until
the Defiler dies!"
XXXVII
ASHES
A light night wind had arisen from the lower prairie, and occasionally
puffed a stray wisp of smoke or heat across the westernmost curve of
the circle. Hot sparks shot up in the air swiftly, paused, and floated
dying down the wind. Above, occasionally, the clear stars peeped in
through the canopy of blackness which the firelight so jealously
guarded. There was a perceptible chill in the air. As the long speech
continued and drew to a close, the half-breed, seated on the prairie
side of the fire, shivered convulsively from time to time, for he was
now almost exhausted by excitement and lack of sleep and food. At
first he had submitted to the trial, if so it might be called,
unwillingly enough, to tell the truth, but without a suspicion that it
could result in anything more serious than a fine for desertion. It
might almost be looked upon as a ransom, and this he was willing to
pay. His principal emotion had been that of frantic chafing because,
for the present, Jim Buckley and Billy Knapp were free to make trouble
for him. He had no doubt they would do so, although he did not know
exactly how they would go at it.