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As with any other people, love-making is more or less in vogue at all times of the year, but more especially at midsummer, during the characteristic reunions and festivities of that season. The young men go about usually in pairs, and the maidens do likewise. They may meet by chance at any time of day, in the woods or at the spring, but oftenest seek to do so after dark, just outside the teepee.
The Indians had quickly dispersed at the bidding of old Swift Arrow, and soon the camp was once more in peace. Little was said by either of the men as they lay down at opposite parts of the teepee, and it was not long before sleep came to the relief of weariness. For a couple of hours or more the Englishmen were wrapt in deep slumber.
The visiting savages were quiet, the missionaries moved about in and out of the shops and cabins; the Christian indians worked industriously in the fields, while the renegades lolled before a prominent teepee. "This quiet looks bad," whispered Jonathan to Wetzel. No shouts were heard; not a hostile Indian was seen to move.
The medicine pole was a tall pole bearing a feathered shield, with the tribal totem, a white Buffalo, which Yan had set up to be in Indian fashion. Sighting in line from the teepee over this, they walked on, looking far beyond, for they had learned always to draw the arrow to the head. They had not gone twenty-five feet before Yan burst out in unutterable astonishment: "Look!
He volunteered to discipline Char-less if he should ill-treat any of the others, and was about to administer grievous personal punishment for some trifling offense, when Blackhawk gave him a warning that had good effect. Yan's note-book was fully discussed and his drawings greatly admired. He set to work at once with friendly enthusiasm to paint the Boilers' teepee.
"Well," answered Yan, promptly assuming the leadership and rejoicing in his ability to speak as an authority, "the Plains Injuns make their teepees of skins, but the wood Injuns generally use Birch bark." "Well, I bet you can't find skins or Birch bark enough in this woods to make a teepee big enough for a Chipmunk to chaw nuts in." "We can use Elm bark."
"As I pursued my journey, I saw near the banks of the river a teepee; I entered it, and saw paint and all that a warrior needed to dress himself in order to be fit to enter the city of spirits. I sat down and plaited my hair, I put vermilion on my cheeks, and arranged the war-eagle feathers in my head. Here, I said to myself, did my father rest when he was on the same journey.
Red Snake, squatted on a blanket beside his teepee, listened with immobile features but with a thrilled heart. He summoned a council of the chiefs, secretly, and the medicine man addressed his message to them also. Thereafter the Indians of Shi-wah-ki were restive. Their growing spirit of rebellion manifested itself in foolish little offenses against the white men.
He knew that supper would be quite ready before he had finished his own work of unloading the canoe and setting up the teepee. In this latter work he needed no help. There were no tent-pegs to drive into the hard ground. He had only to erect the tall poles in pyramid shape, and then enclose them in the buffalo-skin cover, lacing the latter together down to the door flap.
Seventy years ago, among the twenty-five thousand Sioux Indians in the United States, there was not a single church, not even one professing Christian. They were all polytheistic pagans. There were signs of pagan worship about every teepee. It might be the medicine sack tied behind the conical wigwam, or a yard of broadcloth, floating from the top of a flagpole as a sacrifice to some deity.
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