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But for all that, they still cling with something bordering upon affection to the primitive weapons of their race. During the long winter nights the old Indians seat themselves before the fire and carve bows, ornament club handles, and feather and point arrows. Perhaps in some of the tepees hang polished guns furnished by the Government, but they are more for ornament than use.
The lodge poles were left standing in readiness for their return next summer, and it wasn't long before all their worldly goods save their skin tepees and most of their traps, which had been left on their last winter's hunting grounds were placed aboard their three canoes, and off they paddled to the Post, to say good-bye, while Amik secured his advances.
So, at least, Father de Smet said. He alone did not despair. He alone tried neither charm nor curse. He dressed him an altar in the wilderness, and he prayed at it but not for impossible things. When in a day's journey you come across two lodges of Indians, sixty souls in each, lying dead and distorted from the plague in their desolate tepees, you do not pray, if you are a man like Father de Smet.
"He must eat," said I, and so started to loosen his hobble. Thus engaged I thought to push on toward the top of the next ridge to see what might be beyond. What I saw was the worst thing that could have met my eyes. I sank down almost in despair. There, on a flat valley nearly a mile away in its slow descent, stood the peaked tops of more than a score of Indian tepees.
There were places where the prairie was black with buffalo, and the shy deer showed their delicate heads among the leafless willows of the Papillion. When they the children were cold, this young man brought in baskets of buffalo chips from the prairie and built them a fire, or he hung more skins up at the entrance to the tepees.
Near by were several tepees, the tops of which emitted smoke. Straight, black-haired Indians in bright blankets moved slowly from tent to tent. Alfonso scarcely conscious had strange dreams.
A party of Indians had just beached their canoes, and were exchanging greetings with another party, evidently that whose tepees stood on the meadow outside the fort, for among the women he saw the Indian girl who had fled through the willows after encountering him.
Beyond the fringe of brush there was an open space, but as we reached this, both paused, stricken dumb by horror at the sight which met our view. The ground before us was strewn with dead, and mutilated bodies, and was black with ashes where the tepees had been burned, and their contents scattered broadcast.
He had won by heroic deeds the privilege of staking his wigwam within the great circle of tepees. He was also one of the most generous gift givers to the toothless old people. For this he was entitled to the red-painted smoke lapels on his cone-shaped dwelling. He was proud of his honors. He never wearied of rehearsing nightly his own brave deeds.
Overwhelmed by the capture of their chief men, on our march to Fort Cobb, induced partly by threatened danger to these captive chiefs, but mostly by bewilderment at the presence of such a large force in their country in midwinter, after much stratagem and time-gaining delays they came at last to the white commander's terms, and pitched their tepees just beyond our camp.
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