When Torridon wakened, the sun was not five minutes below the horizon, and he jumped from his blankets and reproached himself in silent gloom. For many days, now, he had been striving to imitate the habits of Roger Lincoln. That great hunter had observed that life on the plains was best begun with the first grayness of dawn, and best ended with the total dark. Or, he would say, a little more morning, a little more evening, made one day into two. Even the Indians might be gained upon in this manner, and as for the ordinary whites who trekked across the plains, they worked like moles, a step at a time, blindly.

But here was another day stolen almost upon Torridon before he was on his feet.

He was surprised that the fire was not burning, but, as a matter of fact, Roger Lincoln was nowhere around. The gray mare grazed close to the camp, near tall Ashur. But Roger Lincoln apparently had gone off to hunt; his rifle was missing with him.

This was not extraordinary. Between the dark and the dawn always was the best hunting, he used to observe—when the plains animals were least aware of the world, their senses yet unsharpened, and before they were aware that the sheltering blanket of the night had been withdrawn from them they might be stolen upon and dispatched.

The sun had a dazzling eye out over the plain before Torridon had finished these observations. In a moment more it was above the edge of the sky. It was time to prepare breakfast. As a matter of fact, Roger Lincoln did not like to make fires in the day; the thin arms of smoke that rose waved signals to a great distance and attracted unknown eyes.

“Everything you don’t know is dangerous,” Lincoln was apt to say.

Therefore, in the preparation of the fire, Torridon was extra careful. In a small patch of brush nearby he found some dead branches, and these he broke up small, and lighted and maintained the smallest of fires. He had learned from Lincoln, too, that a great flare of fire is not necessary for cookery. A small tongue of flame playing constantly right on the bottom of a pan will accomplish great results. And it is a fine art to extend gradually a bed of coals that casts off no smoke at all.

By great efforts and perfect concentration, he was assured when he had breakfast prepared that there had not been more than one or two puffs of smoke large enough to be worth noticing. The rest was a fume that hardly could have been visible two hundred yards away.

When he had finished the cookery, he sat down to wait. It might be that Lincoln had found an attractive shot, wounded the game, and been drawn far afield to track it.

So he waited a full hour, ate a cold meal, and settled himself again.

The sun was high, walking slowly through the heavens, and the heat became momently greater. The air was delicate with the scent of the May bloom of the prairie. And he began to drowse.

Since they began their long march for Fort Kendry, and had voyaged beyond the settlements into the emptiness of the plains, Lincoln had insisted on hard journeys every day, and Torridon, in consequence, had been put through a severe grilling. He had grown thinner and more brown in the open air. His muscles were taking on a tough fiber such as they never had possessed before, but nevertheless it had often been torture. He was just beginning to be inured to the labor and the constant racking in the saddle. If it had not been for the silken gaits of the great black stallion, he knew that he never could have kept up his end. But now he saw a chance to rest.

Roger Lincoln, no doubt, never would have dreamed of drowsing in the uncovered nakedness of the prairie during the day, but that was because he was almost more panther than man. And young Torridon felt that he was gathered into a deep security by the very fact that, no matter what enemy the prairie might hold, it also held Roger Lincoln. To the wisdom, the skill, the courage of that famous man he implicitly bowed.

So he fell sound asleep, with his head in the shadow of a small bush. There would be a quiet lecture from Lincoln when that hunter returned to the camp, but the joy of relaxing in the sun that drew the soreness from his muscles was more than the youngster could forego.

He wakened at last with a start, feeling that he had been hearing whispering voices. His heart was beating wildly, and he got to his knees and looked cautiously about him.

Lincoln’s gray mare and Ashur still were grazing nearby; nothing stirred on the plain except the shining footprints of the wind upon the grass, now and again.

He was reassured by this sense of peace until, glancing down, he saw that his shadow lay small at his feet. The sun was straight overhead, and he had slept away the entire morning. Half a day had gone by, and there was no trace of Roger Lincoln’s return.

In seven hours he could have gone afoot nearly twenty miles out and twenty miles back. But it might be that, starting back with a heavy load of newly shot game, he had stepped in a hole and wrenched an ankle. Even Roger Lincoln could not be entirely impervious to accident.

Torridon made up two packs, carefully, like a schoolboy working to please a master, for Lincoln was a shrewd and keen critic of everything that his pupil did. He knew how to make silence thunder with his displeasure.

When that work seemed fairly well done, then he mounted Ashur, and, taking the gray on the lead, he began to ride through the prairie. Lincoln had showed him how to go about such a thing, using a starting point as the center of widening circles, and so tracing a larger and a larger web, covering every inch of the ground.

For two hours he kept Ashur in brisk motion. At the end of that time he paused at the verge of a riverbed and began to arrange his thoughts. There had been no sight and there had been no sign of his companion. Though, from the back of a horse, half a dozen times he had been on low hillocks from which the plain was visible for many miles around, nothing had moved into his ken.

He freshened his grip on the heavy rifle that he had learned to balance across the pommel of his saddle, and fought back the panic that leaped up in his breast. Something had happened to Roger Lincoln! He swallowed hard when he thought what that meant.

Fort Kendry, where he hoped to find Nancy Brett, still was eight days’ march away from them, Lincoln had said, and, as for its direction, he had only the slightest idea. He could see, now, that he had been following the great scout with half of his brain asleep, trusting blindly to the guidance of his companion and never trying to think out the trail problems for himself.

He was lost, then. He was totally lost.

Across his mind went grim memories of tales he had heard from Lincoln about the plains—men who wandered for weary weeks, with no game in sight, with no glimpse of a human being, until chance saved them—saved one out of a hundred who passed through such a time.

And he, Paul Torridon, ignorant totally of all that a lonely man should do, ignorant of the way to return, ignorant of the trail that lay ahead, what would become of him? Dreadful panic gripped him, shook him. He was lost!

He got down off his horse and took out paper and pencil. He wrote swiftly:

To whoever finds my body. If my gun and my horse are near, you are welcome to them. Treat the horse well. It is the best I ever have seen. Only—if you wish to ride him, don’t wear spurs. They drive him mad. Whatever I have you are welcome to.

But for heaven’s sake take the enclosed note to Nancy Brett, at Fort Kendry. She is living there with her cousin, Samuel Brett, and his wife.

He signed that Paul Torridon, and then he went on to write, more slowly:

Dear Nancy:

I write this knowing that I am hopelessly lost on the plains and that I haven’t one chance in a hundred of coming out alive. This will reach you only if white men and not red find my body.

Dear Nancy, you will have heard terrible things about the way we broke out from John Brett’s house. They kept me locked in the cellar for ten days. They did what they could to torment me, and on the eleventh morning they were to finish me off. That night Roger Lincoln came. He managed to slip past the guards and get to me. They surprised us as we were trying to get out. In the fight, I know that we shot down four men. I hope that all of them lived. If not, I want you to know that we only fired because we were fighting for our lives.

Then Roger Lincoln started to take me west to Fort Kendry, because he had heard from Jack that you were to be taken there. We got to this point, then Roger disappeared one morning from the camp.

Whether some animal killed him, or Indians surprised him, I don’t know. I only know that he didn’t come back. If he is dead, heaven be good to him. He was the bravest and the best man in the world!

Oh, Nancy, if I had known that our ride down the valley was to be the last time that I should ever see you, I never would have left. But that chance is gone. I’d think that my life was thrown away—because I’ve never done anything worth living for—but I know that for one day, at least, you loved me, dearest Nan, and that is more than the world to me. And when I think of you now, it makes my heart ache more than death can do.

Beautiful, beautiful Nan, good bye. Remember me.

His heartbreaking sorrow he forgot with desperate speed. Here was food for a month, if only he could catch it. At the shift of his rifle to his shoulder, the deer saw him and leaped not back, but straight ahead. It was a blurred streak at which he fired. The racing animal gave three tremendous bounds, the last high in the air, and fell dead.

Torridon stood up and looked to the white-hot sky in mute thankfulness. Certainly this was a gift from heaven to him, the novice hunter.

Feverishly, paying no heed to the future, but all for the sake of the future, he worked during the rest of that day. He had been shown by Lincoln the proper way to strip off a pelt, but he rather hacked the good hide away. The meat was what he wanted, and that meat he cut into long strips. Out of the willows along the riverbed he prepared many slender sticks, and these he used to hang the venison upon.

How long would the sun take to dry the meat thoroughly?

Then night came on him as his labors neared an end. He was tired with excitement and with work. He lay down and slept like a child. Once, before morning, Ashur neighed softly, and stamped. Torridon was on his feet at once, and found the great black stallion beside him, almost trampling on him, while the pricked ears and the glistening eyes of the horse were turned toward the north. Yonder in the darkness some danger was moving—coyote, wolf, bear, Indian, renegade white. He knew that the two fine horses would be enough to enlarge the heart of any trapper with fierce greed, and, as for the Indians, Roger Lincoln had assured him that any Indian on the plains would pay all but life for the possession even of the famous gray mare, to say nothing of that matchless king of runners, Ashur.

Still lay Torridon, one ear close to the ground, his attention directed by the stallion, as Ashur veered a little, and pointed now more to the east. Yet Torridon heard nothing whatever. A long half hour—and then Ashur put down his head and began to graze once more. The danger had ended.

And Torridon, though he told himself that he could not sleep again after such a shock, was almost instantly in slumber once more. After all, there was Ashur, more keenly alive and alert, more dependable than any human sentinel.

The morning was only past him while his brain still was befogged. His first thought was: I have lived one day in the desert, and the finish of me is not yet. No, there’s the meat that will keep me alive for a long time, if I use patience.

It was a day of burning heat. It ate through the coat of Torridon, stout homespun though it was, and fairly singed his shoulders. It covered the prairie with shimmering lines of heat as with a veil, and it wrought wonders upon the meat, as though a slow fire were playing on the wet venison.

All that day and the next Torridon watched the curing of the meat. But by that time he began to feel that the prairie, after all, was not so totally dangerous. Running down the edge of the narrow rivulet that wound back and forth through the pebbles and the boulders of the stream bottom, there seemed to be a constant procession of rabbits. He did not need to shoot them. The simplest little traps, constructed as Lincoln had showed him how to do, were sufficient to snare the jacks. Torridon lived well and watched his venison cure to strips withered and black-looking, hard as boards, but promising much nutriment. He had a pack of that food prepared before the thing was ended, and then he asked himself where he should go.

What would Roger Lincoln do if he were not dead and ever managed to escape from the troubles that now held him? It seemed obvious to Torridon. In the first place, the hunter would inquire at Fort Kendry to learn if the traveler had come. In the second place, Lincoln would go to the spot of that last camp and there strive to take up the trail.

So Torridon went back, and, where the fire had been built, he drove down a strong stake. The stake he split, and in the split he fixed firmly a bit of paper that simply said:

Dear Roger:

I’ve decided to go south to the first river, and then follow that river toward the right—west. I’ll keep on it to its source. I don’t know what else to do, and I’d go mad if I stayed here in the loneliness without a move of some kind.

Paul Torridon

At the first loud words of that song, as though in answer to them, the gray mare, Comanche, and the tall, black stallion rushed up onto the narrow island, snorting with terror. Ashur, as by instinct, made straight for his master. The mare crowded at his side.

At that the voice of the prostrate Indian was raised to a higher key, and, although the words were perfectly unknown to Torridon, he could not help feeling in them terror and exultation combined. For the whole body of the Indian was now pulsing with emotion.

Now the thunder grew, and, glancing back over his shoulder, Torridon at last saw the cause of it. He saw a steep wall of water plunging down the northern branch of the river, while the southern fork remained as dry as ever, only a small trickle of water meandering through the center of the bed of sand and pebbles and boulders.

He could remember that in the many tales of Roger Lincoln there had been descriptions of just such floods as this, caused by heavy rainfall in the hills, when the heavens sometimes opened and let down the water in sheets. Sweeping into the courses, sluiced off the naked brown hills, those waters then began a headlong descent, sometimes smashing open beaver dams and adding the treasures of those waters to the original flood.

Among such phenomena this must have been a giant, for the strong gorge was crowded with the water almost to its brim. Out of the frothing current whole trees were flung up, like the arms of a hidden giant rejoicing in his strength, and, as the wave plunged on its way, it sliced away the banks on either side, so that a continual swath of trees was toppling inward as though brought down by a pair of incredible scythes.

Whether madman or monster, the prostrate Indian was a human being. What would happen to this tottering little island when the vast wall of water struck it? Already, at the thunderous coming of the flood, the trees trembled; a fissure was opened inside the big tree that leaned out from the bank toward the north.

Torridon caught the sleeper by the naked shoulder and shook him. Under his hand he felt the flesh cold as earth, and covered with an icy damp. And though he shouted and pointed toward the rush of water, the other would not stir. He merely cast out both hands before him and began to shout his chant more loudly than ever.

And then the water struck. There was an instant visible and audible blow. It shook Torridon so that he almost fell, and the gray mare was flung to her knees. The big tree at the side of the island lurched halfway to a fall, with a sound like the tearing of strong canvas in the hands of a giant as the roots were snapped.

The whole forward point of the land was torn away, and huge arms of yellow spray leaped fifty or a hundred feet in the air. The rain of their descent drenched horse and man, and the air was filled with a sort of brownish mist so that Torridon could see only dimly what followed.

He was sure of death, but he yearned to see death coming clearly.

Then, at his very side, the whole edge of the island went down. Vast froth was boiling at his feet as he staggered back against the side of Ashur. Out of the maddening waters a tree trunk, stripped of its branches in the ceaseless mill of the tumbling flood, was shot up, javelin-wise—a ton-weight javelin—flung lightly through the air. It rose, it towered above them, and it fell with a mighty crash—upon the motionless Indian, as Torridon thought in his first horror. But then he saw that the still quivering trunk lay at the head of the red man, its dripping side mere inches away from the skull that it would have crushed like an egg.

And the wall of water was gone. Its thunder departed into the distance with the speed of a galloping horse, and, behind it, it left the gorge with a rushing current. The air cleared from the mist. In those currents Torridon could see boulders spinning near the surface like corks. He was more amazed and bewildered by the force in that after-current than he had been by the face and forefront of the flood.

Yet that storm of water decreased with wonderful rapidity. In a few moments the gorge was hardly ankle-deep with a sliding, bubbling stream, and the wet, raw edges of the ravine dripped into the currents.

Then Torridon could look around him, and he saw that they stood on a little platform barely large enough to accommodate the two humans and the two horses. In the very center stood one thick-trunked tree, and doubtless its ancient roots, reaching far down, had been the one anchor that the moving waters had been unable to wrench away. Otherwise, man and horse must have gone down like straws in that dreadful mill.

The Indian now rose, though with great effort. He staggered, and had to lean a shoulder against the trunk of the tree. Then he threw up both his hands and burst into a chant louder than any he had uttered before. He seemed to be half mad with joy. Sometimes in the midst of his strange singing, laughter swelled in his throat. Tears of extreme joy shone in his eyes.

Torridon would have put the fellow down as a hopeless madman, but something in that ecstatic voice and in the raised head told him that the warrior was speaking to his creator. It was like a war song of triumph, it was also like a great prayer and a thanksgiving.

As for the meaning, Torridon had no clue, but he waited, determined to be wary and cautious.

Never take your eyes from a hostile, night or day, Roger Lincoln had said. He’ll count coup on you while you’re asleep, and take a scalp, even if he can’t get a hundred yards away before vengeance overtakes him.

When the song of the Indian ended, it seemed as though life had ended in him, also. He slid down the trunk of the tree until he lay crumpled at its base. His eyes were open and glaring; there was a faint froth on his lips. Torridon assured himself that the fellow was dead. But when he felt above the heart of the red man, he was aware of a faint pulsation, feeble, and very rapid and uneven. The body that had been so clammy to the touch was now burning with feverish heat. He was not dead, but he was very sick.

Torridon looked from their crumbling island across the long leagues of prairie that stretched on either side of the trees fringing the watercourse.

The temptation was plain in him to be away from this place and turn his back on the sick man. He knew nothing about such matters, but even a child could have told that, left unassisted, the other would die before the sun went down.

Then strong conscience took hold on Torridon. He set his teeth and looked about him, determined to fight off that death if he could. If he had been but six months on the plains, he might have had another viewpoint, filled with the prejudices of the trappers and hunters of the frontier, but to him now this was simply a human being with skin that was not white.

First of all he must get the man from the island, and that would not be easy. Then for a safer place to which to take him.

He went down to explore, the stallion and the mare slipping and stumbling after him down the sheer side of the bluff. From the bed of the stream he turned up the southern fork, and he had not gone a hundred yards before he discovered what he wanted—an opening among big trees on its bank, with a promise of present shelter.

He returned to the island, the two horses following close at his heels. The terror through which they had passed was still upon them. No doubt they felt that only the mysterious wisdom of the human had saved them from being caught into the whirl of the waters. Now they crowded at the heels of their protector. He had to wave them back as he climbed up the slope again.

He found the red man totally unconscious now. It was a limp body that he took into his arms and half carried, half dragged to the verge of the descent. There followed Herculean labor, getting his burden down to the level, but once there the task was much easier. He managed to fold the Indian like a half-filled sack over the back of the mare, because she was lower, and because Ashur no doubt would have bucked off such a burden as often as it was entrusted to him.

But Comanche went cheerfully along under this burden, and she climbed the bank of the southern fork and so brought the sick man to a new home.

The Indian had recovered a little from his trance. The violent jarring and hauling that he had received started him raving. And as Torridon lifted him from the back of the mare, the red man uttered a howl like the bay of a hunting wolf. Torridon almost let his burden fall as he heard that dreadful cry, but afterward the other lay still on the grass, muttering rapidly, his eyes closed or rolling wildly when they opened.

First of all he was dragged onto a blanket. Then with all the haste he could, Torridon prepared a bed of branches, made deep and soft as springs, and covered the top with soft sprigs of green. On this he heaved the Indian with difficulty, for the man was of a big frame, although greatly wasted.

Then there was a shelter to be erected. Torridon had seen enough woodcraft to know something about how it should be built. He had with him a strong hatchet. Rather, it was a broad axe-head, set upon a short haft, and with this he soon felled a number of saplings. The bed he had built close to the trunk of a big and spreading tree. He found a great fallen branch, dead for so long that it was greatly lightened in weight, but still tough and strong. Some fallen limbs rot at once; in others the wood is merely cured. It was all he could do to work the branch near the chosen spot and then to raise its lighter end and lodge it in the fork of the sheltering tree.

This branch now became his ridgepole. Against it he laid the saplings, and in a surprisingly short time he had a comparatively secure shelter. Afterward, when he had more leisure, he could complete the structure with some sort of thatching. In the meantime he had a place that would shield the sick man from the night air.

It was dark when all this had been done, yet he worked on, taking off the packs, arranging the contents within the tent house, and then preparing food.

For his own part, he was ravenously hungry, but when he made a broth of the jerked venison and offered it at the lips of the sick man, the latter clenched his teeth and refused all sustenance. Torridon heaved a cruel sigh of relief. It might be that he would be freed from his captivity by the immediate death of the red man.

That early hope was not fulfilled. For three days the Indian raved and raged and muttered day and night. For a week after that his fever was still high. And then it left him.

If left him a helpless wreck, a ghost of a man. His belly clove against his spine. Deep purple hollows lay between the ribs. His face was shrunken mortally. With his sunken eyes and his great arch of a nose and his projecting chin he looked like a cartoon of a predatory monster. But his wits had returned to him. He lay on the bed and rolled his eyes toward Torridon, and there was, for the first time, sense and life in that glance.

Torridon was enormously cheered. He fell to work with all his might to complete the task that he had pushed forward so far and so well. He had arranged small snares. Each day, out of them he took rabbits and small birds, and he cooked little broths and then stronger stews, and the red man ate and gained slowly in strength.

Torridon knew something about the care of fever patients. At least that they must be fed only a little at a time. Certainly he overdid caution and delayed the recovery of the red man’s strength, but every step forward was a sure step, and never once did the convalescent beg for more food, even when there was a raging fire of hunger in his eyes.

Weeks passed before he could sit up; a long time before he could stand; many days before he could walk; many more before he could ride.

But that was not an empty time for either of them.

He who is raised with a book in his hand comes to need mental occupation as much as he needs food. As for the hunting, it was easily done. Much game followed the course of the stream, up and down. The work around the camp was small, likewise, and, when the brain of the sick man cleared, Torridon spent the remainder of each day with him. And since talk was impossible until he had mastered the language, he set about the study of it.

Never did student make such progress. He himself had been a schoolteacher for four years, cudgeling information into the dull heads of the Bretts. Now he had himself for a pupil and he drove himself remorselessly. He wrote down every word that he heard and memorized it, going patiently over and over the list. There were many sounds that were hard to duplicate with the alphabet. For those sounds he invented symbols. And as he progressed in his talk, he still kept paper at hand and jotted down the corrections that the convalescent red man made.

And, before long, talk could flow freely between them, particularly since, in their conversation, the red man did most of the speaking. For he had much to say, and furthermore he knew how to say it.

His name was Standing Bull. He was a Cheyenne warrior. In the lodge at home he had two wives and three children. He was young, and he was rising in his tribe, and then trouble came to him. He explained it to Torridon as follows.

Eleven times he had been on the warpath. On these excursions he had been very successful. He had brought back many horses, forty or fifty, according to varying counts, for the narrator seemingly allowed himself some latitude. But, more than horses, he had taken three scalps, and he had counted no fewer than eight coups. Of this he was enormously proud.

“What is a coup?” asked Torridon, very curious.

“A child with a gun may take the life of a strong warrior from a distance,” said the Cheyenne, “or a child with a bow may shoot from the darkness and kill a chief. But when a coup is counted it is different. I charge in a battle. I see an enemy. I have a charge in my rifle, but I do not shoot. No, instead of that I keep the bullet in my gun. I rush my enemy. He fires at me. I stoop and the bullet flies over my head. He snatches out a knife. I swerve away from it, and, reaching from my horse, I touch him with my coup stick. It is greater than the killing or the scalping of him.”

“But why?” persisted Torridon. “If you kill him, then there is one less enemy for you and your people. That is a great advantage. You may say that it proves you are a greater warrior than the other man.”

“That is true.” The Cheyenne smiled. “The white men are wise and do clever things. They do many things that the Indian cannot do. The Indian cannot make guns, for instance. Well, still Heammawihio gives the red man some gifts that he does not give to the white man. He gives him understanding of many things. That is only right and fair. You would not want the white man to have all the understanding, White Thunder?”

That was the name he had given to Torridon, because, apparently, he had come into the life of the Cheyenne with a white face, and on the wings of the thundering rush of water that so nearly carried them all into another life.

“No,” agreed Torridon. “Of course the Indians have understanding.”

“And the most important thing of all is the counting of coups.”

“How can that be?” said Torridon, amazed.

“Look,” said the warrior. “What is the greatest thing you wish to have?”

Torridon thought only a moment. “A good woman,” he said.

It was the time when the Cheyenne was halfway toward his natural strength. He could raise himself on his elbows in order to look his companion straight in the face.

When he made sure that Torridon was not jesting, he lay down again with a murmur that was half a grunt.

“Women,” he said at last, “can be bought for horses, or for beads. Women are very good,” he added hastily, for he always showed the greatest tact in saving the feelings of the white man, “because they cook and keep the lodge clean and fresh, they flesh hides and cure them, they make clothes, and, above all, they may bear man children. But, nevertheless, there are other things that you white men want. What are they?”

“We want money, I suppose,” said Torridon, who found it rather difficult to look at life in such a naked fashion. When he looked inward, he hardly knew what would evolve from the mist.

“Money, money,” said the Cheyenne almost harshly. “Well, you want women for wives, and you want money. What else?”

“To do something important.”

“Like what?” said the warrior.

“Like . . . well, building a great house, say. Or making beautiful pictures.”

Standing Bull was hardly able to suppress his scorn. “A great lodge,” he said, “is very well. It is good for little children and for women, and for old men, of course. But for young braves there is no need of a better lodge than this.”

Torridon thought at first that the other meant the wretched shelter in which he then lay. The leaves of the branches had withered now, and with the passage of every wind there was a sad hushing from the crumbling house of leaves. But then Torridon understood that the gesture of the Cheyenne indicated things beyond—the wide blue dome of the sky—it was the evening of the day—and the dim mountains and pillars of cloud beneath it.

He had no answer to this remark. It was hardly possible that he could explain the beauty of architecture to the red man.

“As for paintings,” went on the Indian, “it is true that they are good, too, on a lodge. A wise painter lets the spirits know that they are reverenced. Also, the colors are pleasant to the eye. But though paintings are sacred and pleasant, I never have seen a painted buffalo that looked as much like a real buffalo as this withered branch looks like a whole strong tree planted in the ground.”

“There are other kinds of painting,” suggested Torridon.

The Cheyenne overrode this suggestion with a sweep of his arm in which the muscles were beginning to grow again. “I ask you what you want and you speak of women, money, lodges, paint. Now let me tell you what the Indian wants. He does not want to have many women. Just enough to do the work in his lodge. He does not care for money or for more than a few painted robes to hang on his lodge. But he cares for something else. What he wants to have is many souls.” He paused, triumphantly staring at the white man. “I rush in toward my enemy, I avoid his bullet. I take the cut of his knife in order to touch him with my coup stick. Because, when I do that, some of his soul runs up the stick and passes all over me, and nobody can wash away that new soul that I have stolen. It is mine. I, Standing Bull, have counted eight coups. Who will say, then, that my soul has not been made greater and stronger?”

“What makes you so sure of that?” asked Torridon. “Though I know that you are a brave man, Standing Bull, still I think that the three braves you have killed and scalped are a greater proof of your courage than all your coups.”

The Cheyenne smiled and closed his eyes a moment, a sign that he was thinking hard. At last he shook his head. “Do you know that our word for white man has two meanings?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Torridon. “I know that you use the same word for spider and for white man.”

“This is the reason,” said the Cheyenne. “The spider is more cunning than all other things. It can walk on the air. It can hang in the wind. So does the white man. He, too, can do strange things. He even has thunder canoes, I have heard, though that is hard to believe. But you see that there are some things that the white man cannot understand, and that he cannot do. Well, counting of coups is one of them.

“But you, White Thunder, stay with me a long time and listen to me. When I go back to my people, I am going to make a scalp shirt, and then I shall be a chief. The young men will follow me on the warpath. You shall follow me, also. Now you are a wise white man. I shall make you a wise Indian. And when you are that, then who will be so wise and so great in the world as White Thunder?”

He paused and made a little gesture, palm up. It was as though he had offered to Torridon his own soul in the palm of his hand.

There was only one thing that seriously overclouded their relations, and that was when Torridon told the Cheyenne that he could not remain with him very long, but, as soon as the warrior’s strength had come back, Torridon must make the best of his way across the plains to find Fort Kendry.

When he first asked after Fort Kendry, the Cheyenne had let him understand that he himself knew the way to it perfectly and could direct him so clearly that a child traveling by night could have found the place. But when he understood his companion’s fixed determination of going there, Standing Bull grew sullen and even angry.

“Why should you go to the fort?” he asked. “What is there for you except what they have taken from the poor Indians? But when you go there, you will have to pay for the things that are there.” He added bitterly: “White men do not give away for nothing. They want money and many robes.” He added, by way of coating this bitter comment with sugar: “No one is so clever as a white man. You will not gain when you trade with them, White Thunder.”

“I don’t want guns or robes,” said Torridon patiently. “I only want to find a girl there.”

“Ha!” cried the Cheyenne. “A woman!”

“She is promised to me as my wife,” said Torridon.

“A woman. A woman,” repeated the Indian, and then closed his eyes as though to check a torrent of scorn that was ready to burst forth from his lips. “Tell me, my brother,” he said at last, “is this woman young? Or is she an old squaw with many robes and horses?”

“She is young,” said Torridon. He smiled a little, and then added: “She has no robes or horses. None at all, I suppose.”

“She is strong, then?” said the warrior. “She knows how to flesh skins and how to make soft moccasins and how to bead and do quill work?”

“I don’t think she understands any of those things,” said the white man. “Certainly she isn’t big or strong. She’s very small.”

Again the Cheyenne was forced to close his eyes. “Her father promised her to you? Then he was lucky to find a brave who would take such a . . . woman.” Obviously he had left out the word “worthless” in his pause. He added: “Is she plain, or pretty?”

“She?” said Torridon. Then his breast heaved and his heart swelled. He was talking to a wild Indian, but he had been silent for a long time. “She is the most beautiful creature that ever was made.”

“So?” said the warrior. “Then long before this, some other brave has come and taken her. If you offered five horses for her, he has offered ten. She is gone to his teepee. Think no more about her. A woman cannot make the heart of a great brave sore for many days. Very soon he takes another squaw. If you want wives, you shall have them. When you come home with me to my people, I shall find you the daughters of great chiefs. I shall pay the horses to buy them for you. I shall fill your teepee with everything that you need. Then you will be happy?”

He smiled expectantly, and Torridon was forced to answer slowly: “There is no other who can take her place.” He added: “Any other woman would be horrible to me.”

“Look at me while I speak the truth with a straight tongue,” said the Cheyenne. “One woman has strong hands and fleshes many robes. Another knows how to do bead work swiftly and well. Yes, there is a difference between women. But take two wives in the place of this single one.”

Torridon hunted through his mind. He saw that it was useless to delve into the mysteries of love with this man. “You have many horses?” he asked at last.

“Many . . . many . . .” said the warrior, smiling with pride.

“Are they all the same?”

“No. There is a bay stallion that is worth all the rest.”

“Look at me,” echoed Torridon. “I speak with a straight tongue, too. Your stallion, I think, is worth all the rest. Perhaps, however, he is not worth as much as that gray mare?” He pointed to Comanche, grazing nearby. And as though she knew that she was under discussion, she lifted her lovely head and looked toward them with confidence and affection.

The Cheyenne regarded her with a burning glance. “It is true, it is true,” he muttered, as one who had had that thought often in his mind before.

Torridon whistled. Black Ashur came bounding and stood before them. “But,” said Torridon, “though this mare is very fast, Ashur leaves her standing behind him. Though she is very strong, he will run twice as far as she can run. Though she has a great heart, he will die for me.”

“Is it true?” asked the Cheyenne, the same greedy fire in his eyes. “Yes, it is true,” he answered himself with conviction, “because he has the eye of a chief. Like a chief in council he holds his head. And he runs on the wind. My brother is a great chief among the white men, or he would not have two such horses.”

“Now,” went on Torridon, “if there is such a difference between horses, can there not be such a difference between women?”

“Certainly not,” replied Standing Bull with warmth. “Does a woman carry a brave to battle? Is his life depending on her? Does she give him the speed to run away from danger? Does she give him the speed to overtake his enemy and strike him down? No, no, White Thunder, you are very wise. All white men are wise. But this is a thing about which you will know when you grow older.”

Torridon gave up the debate with a shrug of his shoulders, for he saw that he was facing a wall of rock.

They talked of many other things in the days that followed.

Finally he began to support Standing Bull from the shelter and out under the open sky, and lead him to a blanket where he could sit for hours, drinking up the strength-giving sun and breathing deeply of the pure air.

He was a huge man, standing. He was two or three inches over six feet, with great, spreading shoulders, and arms of an almost unnatural length, set off with huge hands that Torridon could hardly look upon without a shudder of fear. In the old days he had known only two men who impressed him so much. One was Roger Lincoln. But that hero was like Achilles, formidable rather in skill and speed, and graceful surety of all his ways. He was strong, also, but not a giant of power. A giant of power was Jack Brett. He had shoulders as massive as those of the Cheyenne. Perhaps hard labor and the carrying of packs through the woods had given him even a greater force than that of the Indian warrior, but Standing Bull had something of the speed and grace of Roger Lincoln united with the massive might of hand of Jack Brett.

Rarely could an uglier face than the Indian’s have been found, with its great, predatory nose, its wide, thin, cruel lips, the eyes, buried, small, terribly bright and restless, and the chin curving well out. He looked like a very god of battle, and as such Torridon looked upon him.

Lying prone in the shelter of the house of leaves, he could care for and pity Standing Bull, but once the giant was erect and walking, in spite of himself Torridon was daily more and more afraid. He remembered, with increasing frequency and force, the warnings that he had received from Roger Lincoln—an Indian never must be trusted to the hilt. Give him hope, watch him, use him when you can, but recall that always he is as treacherous as a snake.

Torridon, hearing those warnings in the old days, had come to feel that red men were men in form only. And these warnings had been reinforced by stories of midnight massacres, rum-inspired outpourings of murder and cruelty and frightfulness. And all these tales rolled up in his mind and he believed them all when he looked upon the terrible form and face of the Cheyenne.

The very voice of the warrior was like a roll of drums, a heavy bass that reverberated. And when Standing Bull stood outside the tent and shouted with joy because of the goodness of the sun as it burned upon his thin face, Torridon shook as though thunder had pealed in his ear.

At last a day came when the warrior was seen walking beside Ashur, while the latter regarded him cautiously from a corner of his eye.

“Tell me, brother, which horse shall I ride when we go back to my people?”

“Which will you have, Standing Bull?”

“The gray horse is a strong and a wonderful horse. She runs as fast as leaping lightning, but she is not like the black stallion. Only to sit on his back across the plains to the teepees of my people . . .”

Torridon smiled. “The black horse is like black thunder. He is full of strength and wickedness, Standing Bull.”

“Good,” said the warrior. “Saddle him and you will see that I fit the saddle.”

It was his way of saying that no horse could throw him. Torridon half believed that he was right, and he was worried. Once the brave felt the magic of Ashur beneath him, would he be persuaded, except by a greater force than Torridon could show, to part from the stallion?

However, now he was committed, and he saddled Ashur with care, and lengthened the stirrups to fit the great legs of the chief. He stood at the head of the horse and watched the Cheyenne leap into his seat.

“Now,” said Standing Bull.

Ashur crouched like a cat.

“Be wary,” warned Torridon, and stepped back.

Wary was the other.

Nobly, nobly, in another day, Roger Lincoln had sat on the back of that same Ashur, until flung senseless to the ground. The Cheyenne rode in another manner. He was like a panther clutching the back of a wounded bull. And it seemed to Torridon that Ashur had found a master of sheer force at last.

Yet there was an undiscovered spirit in the stallion. He seemed to expand in size, in force, as the seconds flew. He grew a flashing black monster, more in the air than on the ground. And at last, out of a whirl of bucking, out of a dizzy spinning, the Cheyenne emerged headfirst through the cloud of dust, rolled over and over, and then lurched drunkenly to his feet. Blood was running from ears, nose, mouth. But he laughed.

“It is true,” he said. “Heammawihio has made such a horse for only one man. Take him, my brother. I am smaller, now. I shall sit on the gray mare.”

And he laughed again, in the most perfect good nature.

This was the reason that, when they started back over the plains for the Cheyenne village, the Indian was on the gray mare, Comanche. He was hugely delighted with her, and, taking her for a racing course in the most headlong style, he came plunging back to Torridon and assured him that there was nothing among the horses of the Cheyennes that could keep pace with her. He even invited Torridon to race the stallion against the gray, but Torridon put off the suggestion.

He was very willing to believe that Standing Bull felt great obligations to him as a deliverer in time of need, but he could not help remembering the many tales of Roger Lincoln, and sometimes the warrior looked at Ashur with such glittering eyes that Torridon almost felt a knife planted in the small of his back. So he refused to race against the mare, and, when Standing Bull let her stretch away faster and faster—when they were cantering side-by-side—he allowed the mare to go off into the lead and refused to let Ashur measure strides with her.

Eventually Standing Bull gave up his curiosity. Instead, he returned to the tale of the thing that had sent him out to lie on the island by the side of the river. Several times before he had begun the narration, but always had broken off, letting himself be diverted from the point of his talk like a man who is unwilling to tell of things that are too unpleasant.

What had happened, as Torridon eventually found out, was that Standing Bull, in the midst of his rising glory as a fighter, had returned with a war party and found a party of Sioux blocking their way. In the skirmish that followed, all was going well until Standing Bull, giving way to an ecstasy of battle glory, charged in among the Dakotas and tried to count coup on one of the chief braves among the Sioux.

He almost had succeeded, and he grew tense with grief and trouble when he recalled that he had been so close to endless glory. But the Sioux had swayed from the charge and managed to reach the head of Standing Bull with a stroke with the butt end of his rifle. It floored Standing Bull.

When he came to, he found the Dakotas had been forced to retreat before they had a chance to take his scalp or settle him with a knife thrust. But by the time the singing was gone out of his head, he discovered that he had lost that which was more precious to him than the very hair on his head—his medicine bag. He and all the party had searched the ground where the battle was fought. They had scanned every crevice. But the bag was gone and poor Standing Bull was in a frightful state of mind.

“But what is a medicine bag?” asked Torridon.

“The soul of a brave,” said the warrior, and would not explain any further.

However, Torridon in the past had heard enough references to the medicine bag to make him understand that the Indians actually felt the immaterial soul of a warrior was connected with his medicine bag.

With his soul gone from him, Standing Bull found that all his former achievements were looked upon as lost with the medicine bag. He would not be accepted as a member of a war party. His voice would not be heard in the council. And he determined that something desperate must be undertaken in order to change the condition of his life.

The medicine men and the wise sages of the tribe could not advise him. He determined, therefore, to leave the tribe and go forth to make new medicine with the help of the spirits. As a young man goes to consult the future, so Standing Bull went out to lie in danger until a sign was given to him. He had selected the little island where the river forked. It was considered an enchanted spot. Here he lay for four days, never turning from his right side. At last came the thunder of the water; the white man and the two horses rushed up to him, and Standing Bull’s soul was filled with joy, for he felt that this was indeed a direct sign from heaven.

To Torridon this story seemed at once amusing, pathetic, and worthy of inspiring fear. He could understand, after he had heard it, that attitude of the Cheyenne toward him, as though he were a personal possession of Standing Bull, and all that he had with him a part of the property of the brave. Heaven had brought him to Standing Bull. Therefore, being from heaven, he must be treated with respect, consideration, gentleness, but at the same time he belonged to Standing Bull. He had been given to Standing Bull in a dream straight from heaven, a dream so powerful that it had not faded as other visions are apt to fade, but had materialized into flesh and blood and iron.

It was easy, too, to understand why Standing Bull had disliked the thought that Torridon wanted to go to Fort Kendry. Furthermore, it was not really right that a man from heaven should want to go to any place other than the abode of the brave to whom he had been sent as a material dream.

It made a situation so ludicrous that Torridon could have burst into laughter. It made a situation so grave that he was ready to quake with fear. He had serious thoughts of making an attack upon his companion, and then riding off to take his chance on the prairie, but the prairie to him was as unknown as the uncharted sea, and, besides, to attack the warrior would have been no less difficult than to attack a wolf. He slept with one eye open; he was ever on the alert, and Torridon began to submit to his fate with a growing apprehension of what it might lead him to.

So they voyaged across the plains. The weather was clear. Sometimes little clouds of purest crystal white, filled with brilliance, blew rapidly across the sky; otherwise it was washed clear. And all day the heat was blinding and burning in its intensity, and the face of the plains quivered with the heat waves that danced endlessly upward. Often from the burning of the sun against his shoulders, Torridon groaned, and then his big companion would look sharply at him.

“Speak louder, louder, brother,” he would say. “When the spirits wish to use your tongue, speak with a loud voice, so that I may hear.”

Torridon would shake his head and declare that it was only the heat of the sun, but, when he said this, Standing Bull merely smiled a little, secret smile, as though he knew a great deal, and would not press the subject with too many questions. He was willing to be patient with his strange captive.

In the heart of Torridon there was that mingled fear and curious expectancy that filled the old explorers, sailing for the first time through unknown seas, and he turned pale when, on a day, Standing Bull raised his arm and pointed into the eye of the sun. Beneath the sun, like a thickening of the horizon mist, thin clouds were rising—smoke!

“It is there,” said Standing Bull. “Presently we shall see our people.”

The confusion in the Cheyenne’s mind was revealed by that speech. In part he looked on Torridon simply as a white man. In part, the white man was a messenger from heaven, a bringer of luck and medicine to him. And, in part, Torridon was actually a Cheyenne himself, because he had been sent down by the Great Spirit to that tribe.

To a logical and educated mind the three points of view would have been impossible, of course. But Standing Bull could separate the three thoughts. He used them one by one and looked upon his companion in the fashion that was most convenient at the moment.

Presently Standing Bull checked the gray mare. He gestured before him where arose a few swellings of the ground. “Shall I cross the hills and ride in to the village?” he asked.

“You know what is best to do,” said Torridon.

The warrior exclaimed impatiently: “Why do you keep back your knowledge, White Thunder? Do you wish to do me harm? Or do you think that Standing Bull is a fool? No, no! I am not a fool. I know that you have understanding of everything. Otherwise, why did Heammawihio send you to me? Now, be kind to me and tell me what I should do?”

Torridon half closed his eyes. But he saw that it was useless to argue and protest. To Standing Bull he was a miraculous creature. He consulted, therefore, his own disinclination to go into the Cheyenne village.

“We should wait here,” he said at last.

The brave smiled with satisfaction. “They will come out to find me, will they not?” he said. “They will come out and escort me into the city? They will give me honor, White Thunder?”

“They will.” Torridon sighed.

Standing Bull in a vast excitement dismounted, took out his paints, and straightway began to blacken his face. Next he brushed out the mane and the tail of the gray mare. He rubbed away the dust that covered the bead and quillwork on his moccasins and leggings. He combed out his long hair over his shoulders, and he began to put added touches of improvement, such as streaks of paint on his brawny arms. In a few moments he was a brilliant and terrible form, and Torridon looked upon him with awe.

“My heart is filled with impatience, White Thunder!” exclaimed the brave. “Send them out to me soon!”

He hardly had spoken when a boy riding without a saddle galloped a horse over the verge of the hill, swept toward them, and then with a sudden shout wheeled his horse and rushed away. Standing Bull could not speak. He was throttled by emotion and literally bared his teeth like a wolf as he waited.

He was on his horse again, wrapped in his buffalo robe, magnificent and grim, when a cavalcade of half a dozen warriors came over the hill and galloped toward them. The Cheyennes spread out suddenly in a fan, and with a war yell they charged. Torridon glanced at his companion, but he saw a faint smile on the lips of Standing Bull—a smile which that hero was struggling to suppress.

A rush of horsemen, a sweeping cloud of dust, and then they wheeled and came up. Keen glances they flung at Torridon; he felt his scalp prickling on his head.

“Brother!” cried a magnificent youth who seemed the leader of the six riders. “You come with your face blackened. Have you taken a scalp with no harm to yourself? And have you brought this prisoner back with you?”

“Rising Hawk,” said the other, “I have been on such a trail as no Cheyenne ever walked or rode before. But this is not the time to speak of it. There is medicine to be made before another word can pass my lips.”

There was a murmur of eager contentment among the others. They seemed to accept the fact that this was a mystery about to be carried into their encampment. Four remained as a sort of guard of honor; two raced their horses off over the hill, and by the time that Torridon with the others had climbed to the crest, there was a stream of rapid riders swinging out toward him.

He saw a village of lofty teepees that flashed clean as metal against the sun, and between them and the village was a river, fallen very low. The flats on either side of the stream were covered with corn, but so dust-sprinkled that it was hardly visible to the eye at the first glance. Only by the margin of the stream was it a strong green, as though there it had been irrigated.

Out from the big circle of the village riders were breaking—men, women, boys, little girls. Each horse, as it struck the shallow stream, sent a white dash of spray flying high, and then the rider lurched on up the nearer bank.

Torridon felt that the end of the world was flying upon him. The riders came in a vast tide of noise, with arms brandished. Guns exploded. Wild whoops cut at his ears. And around him poured the tribe.

A huge warrior, naked to the waist, drove straight at him with axe lifted, the sun flashing on it. That flash glanced in the very eyes of Torridon. But the blow was not driven home. The brave went on by with a war yell that stunned the brain of Torridon, and in place of the axe wielder, a spearsman was galloping, bent low over the mane of his horse, and with his lance point leveled at the breast of the white man. This time, surely, the steel would slide home through his breast. No, at the last instant the point was raised, glanced over his shoulder, and another terrible cry dinned in his ears. A procession of terrible forms rushed against him and went by, leaving him untouched. Then a naked boy was dancing beside him, threatening him with a knife whose blade was at least a foot long, and sharpened to an airy edge.

Torridon felt that devils had flooded the world. He would have shrunk from this terrible peril, but his nerves were as numb as though paralyzed.

He heard the exultant voice of Standing Bull beside him: “My brother is fearless. He who has ridden down from the sky on the white thunder, what would make him tremble on the earth?”

He could not answer this friendly and proud remark. If he opened his lips, he felt that a scream would come from them.

The riders had formed in a vast, irregularly eddying circle. Dust clouds boiled up. Through the dust he saw the frantic shapes gleaming, men like polished forms of bronze, terrible in action.

And slowly they moved on—they were the focus and the center of the storm. They crossed the creek. They entered the village. They were pushing through solid masses of horses, men, dogs that writhed away before them and closed again behind. The heat became intense. Dust choked Torridon. A knife thrust between the ribs would have been a happy ending to this prologue of terror and burning sun and confusion.

A woman screamed above the din. She was a young squaw, holding an infant boy high above her head, a naked little statue of red-gold in the flash of the sun. Standing Bull did not so much as turn his head, and yet Torridon knew, by instinct, that they had passed one of the wives of the brave.

Before them the crowd began to split; there were warriors working with a sort of organization to push the rest to either side, and so a way was opened to the front of the biggest teepee that Torridon yet had seen. It was painted yellow below, and black above, spotted with little yellow crosses, and on either side of the doorway buffalo bulls were painted with a good deal of skill, and above the doorway a green crescent moon.

In front of the lodge stood a very old man. The arm with which he held his buffalo robe about him was withered like the arm of a mummy. The flesh was gone from his face, but, instead of making him look wrinkled and old, the skin was stretched a little, like parchment. It gave him rather the look of a starved boy than of an old man, and the eyes were bright and bold as the eyes of a child.

Standing Bull dismounted before this ancient, greeting him with the greatest respect. Torridon himself was motioned from his horse and dismounted. His knees sagged under him. A breath would have staggered him, so completely was he unnerved. He felt reasonably sure of death. He would almost have welcomed such an ending, but it was the means that he had in his mind like a nightmare. He had heard the great Roger Lincoln tell of Indian tortures, of splinters thrust under the nails of the victim, and then lighted, of the tearing and shaving away of flesh, of slow roasting over fires.

Those were the images that drifted rapidly between the eyes of Torridon and the strange forms around him. He hardly knew how he was brought into the teepee. But there he found himself seated, with Standing Bull beside him. The old chief, called High Wolf, who seemed to be the head of the tribe, sat facing the doorway. Presently others entered. Finally ten men had come in, each carefully passing behind the backs of the others, avoiding moving before anyone, until they came to a place where they could sit. They were like ten senators at council. Torridon did not need to be told that the ten chief men of the tribe had gathered here for deliberation of some sort. The youngest among them were Standing Bull and that graceful brave, Rising Hawk, who first had come out to meet them.

Outside, the noise was dying down, but when the lodge flap was dropped, the dust clouds were still rising. It was hot in the lodge, although the lower edges had been furled to admit the passage of a draft. It was hot because of the intense sun beating down from above, and because, also, of the fire that burned in a heart-shaped excavation in the center of the lodge with a steaming kettle on it.

“Everything is here,” said High Wolf. “You may eat.”

Standing Bull raised his hand, big as a shield, heavy as metal. “First we must be purified,” he said. “Everyone here must be purified. There is a great medicine in this lodge, High Wolf.”

The old man glanced at Standing Bull. The turning of his eyes was like the stirring of two red lights, but Torridon guessed shrewdly that it was pleasure that moved the great chief.

He himself then took wisps of sweet grass, ignited them, and, waving the smoke to the earth, to the sky, to the four corners of the heavens, he muttered a chant so rapidly that Torridon could not understand the words. Then he carried the smoke to all the guests. They washed their hands in it. This, apparently, was a degree of purification.

Still the ceremonies were not ended. Five small pieces of meat were taken from the pot, and one placed in the palm of High Wolf’s hand, and the other four at the four points of the compass. Then, inverting his hand upon the palm of his left, he allowed the meat to remain there and offered it to the four directions.

The eating began after that. Torridon found a large portion of unsalted buffalo flesh before him. He ate it greedily. He hoped that food would give him sufficient strength to put an end to the faint tremor that was running steadily through his body.

It did not take long to consume the food. After that the pipe was produced by High Wolf. He filled it with a preparation of tobacco and dried leaves of the sumac, flavored with buffalo grease. After that he blew smoke to the earth, to the heavens, and to the four points of the compass, murmuring a phrase with each puff. Then he passed it to his left. So it went to the door, but apparently it could not cross the doorway, and was passed rapidly back from man to man so that it could begin again on the farther side.

This smoking was done with absorption, without speech, and each man held the pipe in a way that differed slightly from that of others.

At last it was empty.

High Wolf turned to Standing Bull. “Brother,” he said, “Heammawihio is a stern master, but he always is just. We were all sorry when you lost your medicine bag. We wondered what you had done that was wrong. Now we hope that it was taken away from you only in order to inspire you to do some great thing. I think you are about to tell what the great thing may be. We are all ready to hear. We all are your friends. To me you are as a child. Therefore, open your heart and we will receive all your words.”

After this courteous invitation all eyes turned upon Standing Bull, and Torridon saw that the braves were in an actual fever of excitement.

That huge warrior, however, remained silent for some time, staring at the ground, and then raised his head on its bull neck and glared up through the smoke hole toward the sun-whitened sky above them. Then he picked from the floor of the teepee just before him a small handful of little pebbles and grains of sand. This he spread smoothly on the flat of his palm, and then puffed it away. There remained two little glittering pebbles, and these he carefully put away in his pouch.

It seemed to Torridon that this was the maddest sort of nonsense, but all the other braves watched it with the most absorbed attention and respect.

“Now,” said Standing Bull, “I have asked the spirits of the air and the under the earth spirits to listen to me. If I say anything that is not true, may they strike me with as many knives as there are grains of dust in that which I have just blown off my hand. If I say the thing that is not true, may they strike me with as many arrows as there were grains of dust, also.”

He paused and looked about him from face to face, and every one of those dignified warriors inclined his head a little as though acknowledging the tremendous force of this oath.

“For the thing I am about to tell,” said Standing Bull, “is hard to understand. I am going to tell you how I sent my soul up to the Sky People, and how my soul came back again with this man and the two horses and all that was with them besides.”

Up to this point Torridon had remained more interested in the possibilities of his future fate than in the talk around him, but at this prodigious lie he could not help glancing down sharply to the ground, prepared to hear the outburst of laughter that would greet the statement of Standing Bull. But there was not a sound.

And when he glanced up again he saw that there was not the slightest indication of mirth in any face. With eyes overbright, the warriors listened, hanging on the words that were next to be spoken. Standing Bull was in no hurry. As one prepared to allow his audience to grow expectant because he had plenty with which to satisfy that expectation, Standing Bull was again looking down to the ground. Or perhaps it might be said that his attitude was that of a man rapt in thought, forgetting those around him while he called up again a vision from the past.

At length he slowly lifted his hand, palm up, and extended his long, powerful arm toward the heavens. Then he said: “When I last saw you, my friends, I was less than a man. My soul was in the hands of the Dakotas. Or else it was rotting on the desert in the rains and drying to dust in the suns. I went out to find another soul.

“I had lain down and asked for a dream and the dream only told me to go out from among my people and follow an invisible guide. I saw no guide, but still I was led for a great distance. I was not told to take a horse, and therefore I left a horse behind me. I did not say farewell to my children or to my wives. I let everything stay behind. Nothing matters to a man so much as his soul.” Here he paused. He lowered the arm that had been raised as though invoking divine witness to the truth of his words. He went on, after a moment: “I was led through many days of marching. But though I had little food, I was not hungry and I was not tired. I was supported by the thing that led me. At last I came to the place where the great river comes to a fork, and above the fork it has two arms. One arm goes north and the other arm goes west. Where they meet, there is an island.” He paused and looked about him for confirmation.

Rising Hawk said gravely: “I myself have seen that island in the last seven days.”

“Do you know what it is now?” asked Standing Bull.

“I know,” said Rising Hawk, and said no more, as though he intended to keep his information secret until the end of the tale, thereby being prepared to check its correctness. This made all heads turn for an instant toward Rising Hawk. Excitement apparently was rising fast. This story would be corroborated or completely disproved by an adequate witness.

“Good,” said Standing Bull. “I do not say the thing that is not true. Therefore I am glad that Rising Hawk has seen the place. But when I came to it the spirit that conducted me told me to stay there and lie down. I lay down on my right side, with my head to the east and with my face to the north. I lay on my right side for a long time, waiting for something to happen.

“After a while I began to grow hungry, but more than the hunger was the thirst, and that thirst was like a fire in me, and all the while I could hear the running of the water among the stones in the bed of the river. Sometimes I fell asleep and dreamed that I was the bed of the river and that the cool water was running through my mouth. But I always waked up and found that I still lay on the hard ground. And my bones began to press through my flesh. My muscles asked me to turn, only a little bit, because they were dying. Still I would not turn. I did not want to get up and go away. I did not care to live if I had no soul. All at once, in the middle of a sleep, a voice said to me . . . ‘Stand up and follow me.’

“I knew that it was a spirit. I tried to get up, but I was too weak to move. Then the spirit said . . . ‘Your body cannot get up, so leave it behind you.’ Then I tried to throw out my thought after the spirit, and all at once I felt as though my body were falling down through thin air. The next moment I was standing on my feet. I looked down, and in the starlight I saw that I was still lying on the ground. Then I knew that my soul had come away from my body. I heard the spirit call again. I walked. And at one step I crossed to the farther bank of the river. I could see the spirit now. It was an old man with feathers in his hair. He had the ghost of a war bow and stone-pointed arrows in his hand, and the ghost of a painted robe was flying over his shoulders in the wind. He smiled and reached out his hand. ‘Come with me,’ he said. He began to walk up through the air. I followed him, and it was as easy to walk up through the air as it was to walk along the ground. Every step we took was longer than the width of this camp.

“After a while we came to the tops of some mountains and we sat down to rest. We could see all the rivers spread out at our feet. Only, to the north and east, there was a shadow on the earth. I said to my guide . . . ‘What is that?’ ‘It is the land of the Dakotas,’ he answered me. Then we stood up and walked through the air again, always going higher, until we reached the clouds. Our bodies were so light that it was rather hard work to walk through them. It was like going in mud. At last we came to the top of the clouds and I saw the sky country filled with Sky People.”

He paused again and looked down with a frown. There was a most breathless silence while the others attended this strange narration. Torridon looked to the chief, expecting that his superior intelligence and experience would at once penetrate the deceit, but, instead, the nostrils of the old man were quivering and his hollow chest heaved with a passionate joy and belief.

“When I try to remember what was up there,” said Standing Bull with a sort of baffled dignity, “my mind walks through darkness. However, I met many good Indians up there. I remember I heard a sound like ten thousand warriors all shouting for battle. I asked what it was and they told me that it was the sound of the wind whistling through the robe of Heammawihio as he strides across the sky country. I remember, too, that I stood before a man as tall as a mountain. He looked like a mountain when it turns blue in the evening. I kneeled before him and begged him to give me another soul. He said that he would. His voice was like the sound of a great river after the spring floods have begun. He offered me a soul in the palm of his hand, but I said . . . ‘If I go back and say that is my new soul, my people will not believe me. Give me a soul that they can see.’

“After a while he said . . . ‘You ask for a great deal, but I want to please you. You have fought bravely. I have watched you in the field and I never saw you turn away from an equal enemy. Now I am going to make a soul for you.’ He took up what looked like white clay and began to work it with his fingers, like an old woman molding a pot. After a while he leaned and breathed on it, and there was a sound like a nation singing. After that the lump of clay stood up, breathed, spoke, and was a man.”

The narrator turned to Torridon. “It was this man,” he said.

There was a stir, an intake of breath like a groan. Torridon saw beads of moisture standing on the forehead of Rising Hawk. Not a shadow of disbelief appeared on any face. These people, more simple than children, did not have to be told that it was a fairy tale they were hearing. They were willing to believe with a wonderful faith.

“‘This is your soul!’ said Heammawihio to me. ‘You had better go down to the earth at once. You had better hurry. The Underwater People are very angry because I am helping you. They want to have you and now they are sending down water devils who will destroy your body. If your body is destroyed, of course this new soul will be no good to you.’ Then he showed me where a white-headed flood was racing down the river toward the island where my body lay.

“I said . . . ‘Alas, we never can get to the body in time.’

“‘That is true,’ said the voice. ‘Then you must have horses to ride.’

“I saw his hand reach away like the shadow of a cloud that reaches across a valley in a moment. The shadow came back and put two horses beside us. One horse was like silver. One was as black as night.

“‘Which horse will you take?’ asked the voice.

“I looked at the white mare. She was like silver. I said that I would take her.

“‘You are wrong,’ said Heammawihio, ‘because the black stallion is much better than she. But they are both medicine horses. However, you chose the silver mare, and therefore you must keep her and always let your soul ride on the black stallion. Now you must go, and you had better hurry. When you come safely back to the Cheyennes tell them that they are my people. The air that I breathe is sweet with the smoke that they blow up to me.’

“When he had said this, my soul and I got on the horses. They were only the ghosts of horses. We jumped them off the edge of a cloud and they went down like birds. But when I looked before me, I could see a great distance away, because the sun was shining now. I saw the island. I saw my body lying on it, and I saw the flood coming down faster than we could go. I said to my soul . . . ‘What shall we do?’ He said to me . . . ‘Call to the white thunder.’ Then I called, and a terrible noise took hold of us, and white thunder wrapped us around, and suddenly we were standing on the island. I looked about me and found my body, and I got into it.

“When I opened my eyes, the flood was almost on the island. I looked around me. To the eyes of my spirit, the two horses and the new soul had been as real as this knife.” He snatched a long weapon from his belt and buried it in the earth with a powerful gesture. Then he went on: “But when I looked at them with the dim eyes of a man, they were no more solid than the shapes of mist that come out of the ground on a moonlight evening. But every moment they got thicker and more real. I sang a song to them and told them to hurry and help me, because I was too weak to move. All at once they turned into two real horses and a real man. He caught me up. Then the flood struck the island. It tore away almost all of it. It tore away the ground that I had been lying on. It made a noise like thunder, and I could hear the underwater devils groaning and shouting with anger because they could not have my body.

“Then White Thunder, which is the name of this man that the Great Spirit sent down with me, took me away and took care of me while I lay very sick, with all my blood turned into fire. After that, when he had made me strong again with his magic and his strong medicine, we rode back to my people.” He paused again, sat up to his stiffest, fullest height, and looked across at Rising Hawk.

“Friend,” he said, “this is a meeting of the great men of the Cheyennes. Everyone should hear only the truth. If you have seen the island, speak and let them know if I have said the thing that is not.”

Torridon waited, breathless.

Rising Hawk swallowed and then struck the arch of his chest until it resounded like a drum. “I have seen that island within seven suns,” he declared. “It was half as big as this village. There were many trees on it. But when I looked at it again, I saw that it was torn to pieces. All that was left of it was one tree standing, and even the roots of that one tree were washed bare on the north side. So I give my witness that we have heard the truth from our brother.”

After the conclusion of this short speech from Rising Hawk everyone seemed to take it for granted that no further proof was needed. Rising Hawk had seen that the island at the fork of the river actually had been almost destroyed. That was enough, apparently, to verify all of the odd tale that Standing Bull had told.

He, like a hero overcome by the mere thought of what he had been through, allowed himself to sink against the backrest and fall into a profound contemplation, but the others chattered like birds. Torridon, who had in mind ten thousand tales of their taciturnity, was amazed to see them talking all at once, like enthusiastic women.

They never for an instant cast a doubt on the story of their companion, but they declared that undoubtedly he had brought a great blessing upon the entire Cheyenne people, because he had carried down from heaven an actual spirit. Upon Torridon they turned their eyes with the frankest curiosity. If he was something more than man, he was also something less than man, apparently, for they remarked frankly and openly on the slenderness of his hands and the lack of weight in his shoulders, and the delicacy of his features, which proved, they said, that he was not really a white man like those other bronzed ruffians who rode across the plains to traffic or fight with the red man.

What divine properties, then, would they expect him to have? Certainly they had seen that he ate food, cast a shadow, possessed a voice.

But they were all like Standing Bull. They never put facts against facts. They believed what they wanted to believe, and the story of Standing Bull was too good to be thrown away. It was such an exploit as gave distinction to an entire tribe. As for the hero, Torridon puzzled over him a great deal. At last he came to the conclusion that in the first place Standing Bull had made up the story out of ecstasy and a good bit of invention mixed together, but, after telling the tale a few times, it had become letter perfect—and convinced himself.

He had plenty of occasions to tell the story. For the first ten days after the return of Standing Bull there was an endless succession of feasts. Some old man would go through the camp, chanting the names of the guests who were invited to a certain teepee to feast. The feasts were all very much like that which High Wolf had given. There was no change in the food offered, there was a great deal of smoke raised after the eating ended, and then always Standing Bull was called on for his narration.

Each time he talked a little longer. He discovered new details that were worthy of development. For instance, when he declared that his spirit had issued from his body, he said that he had looked at his lifeless self with a great deal of interest. He had leaned and fingered the back of his skull. He had admired the breadth of his shoulders and the strength of his neck, and he had looked for a while at his face, for this was the only time he could see himself except by the treacherous help of standing water or a mirror. For the first time he knew himself.

There was a great deal more of this same sort of thing added by Standing Bull, but his auditors never were tired of listening. They were not all new faces at each feast. Indeed, some of the same men attended a dozen times and always listened with the same earnest, amazed attention. Rising Hawk grew so familiar with the story that he knew when the high points were coming, and he used to rise on his knees, and even whoop with delight when he heard the never-familiar marvels of the story.

As for Torridon, the Indians treated him with a certain respect and contempt commingled. He was regarded as a part of Standing Bull, and was significant simply because he was a gift from Heammawihio. He was a sort of fleshy shadow, in other words.

He was glad enough to be thus lightly regarded by these savage warriors. They were such men as he never had looked upon. There was hardly a warrior under six feet in height, and they were built like Romans, for war and effort. He saw no others quite up to the Herculean standard of Standing Bull, who was like his namesake in massive weight and power, but every man in the tribe was a powerful athlete who lived for one purpose—war. Torridon was glad to slip about among them, almost unnoticed.

Standing Bull treated him very well and made him at home in his teepee. It was a good big lodge, as befitted a man who had two wives and three children. There was a middle-aged squaw who had given her master two daughters; she was a sour-faced creature, but a strong and incessant worker. Her companion, the favored wife of Standing Bull, was called Owl Woman, although Torridon never learned why she should have been given the ugly title. She was the young and handsome mother who Torridon had seen lifting her baby son above her head so that the child might behold the return of his father. Ill-matched as the two wives seemed to be, they got on perfectly; there was never a voice raised in the teepee except when one of the children squawked. Torridon himself was equipped with a bed, a backrest, a post on which he could hang clothes and weapons.

He felt that Standing Bull might have gone on forever attending feasts and talking about his heavenly exploits, but now a cloud was hanging over this section of the great Cheyennes. Two days after the arrival of Torridon, the river that flowed past the encampment ceased running and thereafter no water was to be had except in standing pools, which shrank rapidly under the strength of the summer sun. There were plenty of other places to which they could remove to find water, but that would mean the definite abandonment of the corn crop that had been planted here. Already that corn had suffered from drought. The dusty look that Torridon had noticed had been a true sign of coming death, and, if the drought persisted, there might be cruel want in every lodge in the tribe during the winter to come.

In the meantime the medicine lodge was noisy every day with the incantations of the medicine men, making rain. But though they fasted, strained, and sweated copiously, still not a single black cloud would blow up over the horizon.

Something more than a drought was worrying Torridon. From the first he was allowed to walk about the village as he pleased, but when he asked to be allowed to mount the black stallion, Ashur, he was informed that the horse was very sick and could not be used. This, when with his own eyes he could see the big fellow galloping in the distance, the manifest king of the entire herd belonging to the tribe. When he asked for the gray mare, he was given the same response, although she led home the horse herd at night by a dozen lengths when they were raced in from the pasture grounds, Ashur, like a dutiful lord of his kind, ranging in the rear and hurrying on the laggards while the Indian boys yelled like demons.

He was to be forbidden the use of a horse, then. More than this, wherever he went, he could not make a step without close attendance. Two or three young braves were sure to spy him, and they loitered along in the vicinity, as though their own will conducted them. But after this had happened during several days, he began to understand that the Cheyennes were determined that this gift from Heammawihio should not escape from them if vigilance could prevent it.

To be sure his captivity was not heavy, but his heart was off yonder across the sunburned fields, hurrying toward Nancy Brett and Fort Kendry. He was held here, and who could tell when the kindness of his captors might be exchanged for quite another attitude?

Nervously he waited, and as the drought increased, the village grew more dusty, the faces of the Indians more solemn and sullen, just so much did the face of Nancy Brett grow clearer and dearer to him, and every day he sat with her as they had done once before, at the edge of the river where the crimson and golden forest rolled all its colors into the standing water.

On a day when he was walking past the edge of the village, with two or three braves loitering in his rear, he saw a youth of thirteen or fourteen dragging something on the ground by means of two long leather thongs over his shoulders, but, when he came closer, he saw that the thongs issued out of the shoulders. They actually were fastened to the flesh, and from either shoulder a stream of blood ran slowly down, blackening quickly with dust. Held by the rawhide thongs, a buffalo head was dragged behind the boy, who never ceased walking, although sometimes the fatigue or the misery of his constant pain made him stagger for a step or two.

“Why are you letting that boy torture himself to death?” asked Torridon of one of the braves.

“Do you think that he wants to remain a boy forever?” answered the brave curtly. “Is he to be a woman forever in the tribe? No, but a strong warrior who will go on the warpath and take scalps.”

“Can he take no scalps unless he does this?”

“If he is not braver than pain, if he is not patient and strong so that he can smile at trouble, who would want to ask him to go on the warpath?”

That answer had to content Torridon, although he had an almost irresistible impulse to cut those thongs and set the lad free. But who can free a man from self-inflicted torture?

He had hardly turned his back on that pitiful sight when he saw Standing Bull riding toward him, accompanied by no less a person than the great old chief, High Wolf. They came straight to him and High Wolf gave him a solemn greeting.

“Oh, my friend,” said High Wolf, “you have been among us many days. You have heard the medicine men working to bring the rain and they raise only a dry dust. You see the corn dying by the river, and the river itself is dead. How long will it be, White Thunder, before you take pity on us and bring us the rain?”

Torridon stared in bewilderment. “I know nothing of rain-making,” he said at last, with all the gravity that he could muster.

High Wolf shook his head. “You come from the Sky People,” he said, “where all these things are understood. Heammawihio will be angry with you if you let his people starve for lack of water. Come! Tell me when you will do something for us.”

Torridon looked at him helplessly, but out of that helplessness he began to evolve a thought.

Standing Bull had taken up the argument in the most direct fashion. “If you will not do it from kindness,” he said, “then we must put you in a lodge and keep you there. Let the Sky People come down and feed you and give you water. Or else, if you want anything from us, you must bring down a little rain.”

The face of Torridon grew pale indeed at this announcement. From the moment he first came among them, he had no expectation of these people, except that they would find death for him, and now that expectation was about to be fulfilled. Fire might be more terrible for a moment, but thirst would be an agony long drawn out. For three days, perhaps, he would lie in the lodge, and, unless fortune sent down the rain, he was a lost man. There was perhaps one slender hope.

He said to Standing Bull: “Let you and I go a little way off and talk together.”

Standing Bull went readily enough. He even dismounted, and they stood together out of earshot of High Wolf, who had wrapped himself in his robe and turned his head impatiently toward the south, for from the south alone they could expect rain at this season, it appeared.

“My friend,” said Torridon to the brave, “I know that since you came back among your people and told them the great story about the Sky People and your trip to the clouds you have been looked up to as a wonderful man. But just in order to keep that reputation, are you going to see me starved to death?”

Standing Bull frowned. “Why would it be hard for you to bring us the rain?” he said. “When I lay in the shelter that you had given me, very sick, with fire always burning inside me, death kept coming up to my side like a shadow. But you only had to wave your hand, and death ran away again. You know that I should have died many times if you had not taken care of me. When you went away to hunt, I became sick and weak. When you came back, I always grew strong again. You have a stronger medicine than you need to make rain.” He uttered this odd argument with perfect conviction.

“Listen to me,” said Torridon desperately. “I found you by mere chance. It would have been easy for me to leave you to be washed away by the water. But I stayed with you. I took care of you. Because of that, you wanted me to come to your people. I came to the Cheyennes. Now you treat me as if I am a bad man. You take away my horses. When I walk, you send your warriors to watch me. And now you threaten to starve me to death unless I make rain. I cannot make rain. I know nothing about such things. In fact, no man can make rain. I speak with a straight tongue. Everything that I say is true.”

He paused, breathing hard, and the warrior frowned thoughtfully upon him.

“You were not sent to me from Heammawihio?” he asked soberly.

“I was sent to you by chance,” persisted Torridon. “I was wandering across the prairie. I had lost my way. I only happened to find you.”

“That,” said Standing Bull, “is the way that Heammawihio always works. Everything seems simple. He makes it seem so. But there is no such thing as chance. He watches everything. He sent you to me, though you did not know that you were sent.”

“Suppose that he sent me to you,” argued Torridon, abandoning hopelessly one part of his argument, “does that show that I can make rain?”

“Friend,” said the Cheyenne gently, “I went out to do some good thing for my people and for myself. I prayed to the Sky People. They sent me you. Well, you have done something for me. You have answered that part of my prayer. Because of that I am your friend. My blood is your blood. My lodge is your lodge, and my weapons are your weapons.” He said this with a voice not raised, but deepened and trembling with emotion. Then he went on: “You have given back my life to me, White Thunder. You had cool hands. You killed the fire inside me. So I had one half of my prayer granted to me. Now I ask you to grant me the other half. You have done much for me. But what am I? I am only one man. All my people now are in trouble. I wish you to do good to them. Why do you shake your head? Why are you angry with me? Why do you make me sad, my brother? The great chief is very angry because you do nothing for us. Now, even if I wanted to, I could not take you away. He knows that you have great power.”

Torridon grew paler than ever, and sweat burst out on his forehead.

Seeing this, the Cheyenne continued more gently than ever: “You do not need to make a great rain. Only a few drops to show that you are trying to help us. Or only bring the clouds across the face of the sky . . . then our own wise men can make medicine that will bring down the rain out of the clouds.”

There was no answer to make to this last appeal, and Torridon knew it. He had made an effort through persuasion and that effort had failed signally. Now he reverted to a thought that had been forming in his mind since he was first challenged. He turned to Standing Bull as a cloud of dust enveloped them, for the wind, which had been hanging for ten days in the north, now was shifting suddenly to the south.

“Let us go back to High Wolf. I shall talk with him.”

Anxiously Standing Bull led him back to the impatient old war leader, whose lips were working as he regarded the white man.

“I have talked to Standing Bull, my friend,” said Torridon. “He tells me that I must really try to make the rain come. Very well, I shall do my best.”

At these words a smile, half delighted and half grim, came upon the face of the old man. “To make that medicine,” he said, “tell us what you need. We have horses and dogs to sacrifice. Also, we have painted robes and many other good things, and everything that the medicine men can bring to you from their lodges you shall have . . . rattles and masks, and everything that you wish.”

“Brother,” said Torridon, delighted with this speech, “is it true that I was sent down from the clouds?”

“It is true,” said the chief, staring earnestly at Torridon’s face as though he wished to make surety a little more sure.

“Well, then,” went on Torridon, “if the Sky People are willing to grant my prayer, they need only to hear my voice and to see and recognize me.”

“Good,” said High Wolf. “I know that great things often are simply done. It is not always the largest war party that brings home the most scalps or the most horses. Can we give you nothing?”

“Nothing,” said Torridon. “Only give me what I brought to your city. I had some weapons, and a pack, and two horses.”

Standing Bull exclaimed suddenly. Torridon dared not look at the warrior, who now cried: “High Wolf, this man has two horses that are as fast as the wind! Once he has them how could he be caught if he wished to run away?”

“That is true, also,” remarked the chief. “And why should you need the two horses, my friend?”

“Tell me,” said Torridon, his heart beating fast, but his face sedulously kept calm, “in what way I was sent down from the clouds?”

“With Standing Bull. Is not that true?”

“That is true, of course. But did we come on foot?”

“No, you had two horses.”

“Therefore I must have them again.”

“Why, brother?”

“Because how will they know me? It is a long distance to the Sky People. They are the ones who must send the rain, are they not?”

“Yes, that is true, of course.”

Delighted that his trend of thought was accepted this far, Torridon went on: “If I stand and cry from the midst of the prairie, then it is only a small sound that will come up to their ears.”

“Not if the right words are used,” said the chief instantly, as one sure of himself.

“I myself,” said Torridon, “have sat on the clouds and heard the Cheyennes crying out for pity, and even when the whole tribe was crying out together, and the medicine men were shaking their rattles, and the horses were neighing, the sound came up to my ear as faint and as small as the hum of a bee, half lost in the wind.”

The circumstantial nature of this account opened the eyes of the chief. He waited.

“But when I heard that small sound and looked down I could recognize the whole tribe. Now if they heard my small voice, they would look down and say it is the voice of White Thunder. Then they would call one another and say . . . ‘Is not that White Thunder calling to us?’ And the others would come and look and say . . . ‘It sounds like his voice, but it cannot be he. We sent him off with two horses, one white and one black, so that we could know him easily. But now he has neither of the two.’”

Broke in Standing Bull: “They would simply think that you had lost them.”

“How could I lose them?” answered Torridon, smiling. “I have done nothing but good to the Cheyennes, and the Sky People know it. They would never think that the Cheyennes could have taken my horses away from me.”

Standing Bull bit his lip. He was silenced for the moment but he was far from convinced. Then the war chief said quietly: “What White Thunder says has a good sound to my ears. We will let him have the two horses to ride out where the Sky People may see him and Heammawihio may hear his voice.”

“You will never see him again,” said Standing Bull. “He will go to Fort Kendry like a bird through the air.”

“No.” The chief smiled. “The truth is that, when we send him out, we will not send him alone.”

“What will you do?”

“We will send twenty braves to be around him, and all the rest of the people will be not far off to watch.”

Torridon blinked. It was a mortal blow to his plan, which had been exceedingly simple once he had the matchless power of Ashur beneath him. “High Wolf!” he exclaimed. “What are you thinking of? To send me out, and surround me with a crowd so that Heammawihio will not be able to pick me out from the crowd?”

“I have said the thing that seems to me good,” responded High Wolf. “No man can do better than his best. Now, White Thunder, go and make yourself ready to call the clouds over the sky. Standing Bull, you will bring in the two horses, the black and the silver. I shall prepare the twenty warriors to go with the rain maker.”

The first hope that had sprung so high in the heart of Torridon was half eclipsed by the announcement of the powerful escort in the midst of which he should have to work. But once on the back of Ashur, given half a chance to break free, he would take that chance and depend upon the dizzy speed of the great stallion to make the bullets of the Indians miss if they fired upon him. He felt that he had a faint opportunity left, and the process of the festival might offer him a ghost of a chance.

He went back to the village with the south wind so strongly against him that he had to lean to meet it. Through staggering gusts he advanced down the street of the town. The men were pouring out from their lodges. He felt their eyes upon him already with awe. And presently he made out one of their murmurs: “Already he has put the wind in the south. This is to have a real medicine.”

“He does not have a medicine,” answered another. “He is medicine himself. He is not a mere man. He is neither white nor red.”

Torridon, facing that freshening wind, could not help remembering what he had heard over and over again during the past ten days: that the rain wind was the south wind. He looked with a sudden and frantic hope toward the horizon, but his heart fell again when he saw that all was burnished clear and clean.

He went back to the lodge of Standing Bull and there he made up his pack as it had been when he arrived. Other possessions were shifted about with perfect disregard of ownership, in many cases, but his things had been left alone with an almost superstitious regard. He took his rifle and cleaned and loaded it afresh. He saw to his two double-barreled pistols—the real pride of his life—and so he made himself ready to depart.

All this was done in the midst of a great bustling that spread through the entire camp, and finally Standing Bull called to him from without that the horses were ready.

He stepped through the flap of the tent. The silver beauty and the black were there—Comanche, the mare, looking wild-eyed from her long course of freedom in the open fields, and the stallion ten times more so. But they came like dogs to a master.

A little crowd gathered—the children pressing close, the braves remaining at a more dignified distance—but all eaten with curiosity to see the manner in which the man from the sky would handle these horses from the sky. Apparently they saw enough to stir them. Murmurs of delight and wonder rose from them. Their own animals were not trained to be pets, but to be efficient tools in time of need. Caresses were not lavished on them, and the vast majority were merely wild horses that had been caught, knowing no master except sheer force.

When he took the lead rope from the neck of the silver mare, they spread out their arms to keep her from bolting away, and there were murmurs of wonder when Torridon merely turned his back on her. That murmur grew into pleasant laughter when big Ashur actually strode after his master into the tent. So Torridon carried out all his possessions.

Standing Bull bit his lip as he watched. “Do the Sky People need to see all these things?” he asked.

“They see small and they see big,” said Torridon. “Shall I have them say to one another . . . ‘That is not White Thunder, but only a man who has stolen his horses?’”

To this, Standing Bull made no rejoinder, but his brow remained dark with suspicion. And he prominently added his finest rifle to his equipment as he stood beside the best of his own horses.

The saddling was done with much care by Torridon. He saw to it that the cinches were well secured, and that the packs were strapped on stoutly. Owl Woman helped, as in duty bound, in all this work. At last the bridles were on. The mare was secured to the stallion’s saddle by a lead rope, and then Torridon spoke. At once Ashur dropped upon one knee, almost like a human being making a curtsy, and Torridon stepped easily into the saddle, while the little boys and girls cried out in delight to one another.

Another word and Ashur rose. In his joy he rose sheer up on his hind legs, dropped lightly forward, and leaped high into the air. But Torridon knew these maneuvers. They looked wild and frantic enough to a bystander. As a matter of fact every leap and check was executed with a cat-like softness and grace. It was a sort of system of play, long established between them. Not a morning passed that did not see such gamboling. The silver mare neighed and shook her head, but followed cheerfully beside them, for she understood, also, that it was play.

But the Indians looked on with alarm and wonder. “Aha!” they cried in the hearing of Torridon. “Look! There is a man who can ride a horse. Look at that, my friend!”

“Yes, but that horse has no feet. He has wings, only we cannot see them.”

Whatever their admiration, they did not allow Torridon to proceed unescorted. High Wolf, properly enough, had given charge of the guard of honor to big Standing Bull, and that warrior took harsh command of the selected men. He had picked a score of the best mounted, most savage warriors of the tribe, and these closed in around Torridon, behind, before, and to either side, as he issued from the camp.

Behind them came a group of medicine men, hideously masked as bears, wolves, devils, fantastically draped, carrying noisy rattles. Behind these, in turn, High Wolf rode alone, and after him the rest of the tribe, following no order whatever, men, women, and children, confusedly together, rushed from the village and spread themselves out over the flat.

Well out in the open, Standing Bull led the way to a small plateau, circumscribed by a narrow and steep-sided ravine, or draw. The ground that it enclosed was almost like an island. Here Standing Bull directed that the ceremony should take place. Torridon groaned inwardly. With the throat of this high island choked with men, the only escape would be to leap a horse across the mouth of the ravine, and that was a spring of such dimension that even Ashur well might fail in the effort.

“Now, White Thunder,” said Standing Bull, “we see that you already have called the wind from the right corner of the sky. We know that you can make that wind carry thousands of clouds over us if you speak to the Sky People. Then speak to them, and tell them to have pity on the Cheyennes.”

“Keep back from me,” said Torridon. “All keep far back from me. Have your guns ready,” he added after a moment. “Let every rifle and pistol be charged.”

Standing Bull looked curiously at him. It was not the sort of request that he had expected. But he repeated the order, and the few warriors who had not already loaded their weapons immediately obeyed the suggestion.

They drew back to the verge of the little plateau. Torridon was left in the center, surrounded by potential enemies, and feeling half desperate and half foolish, like one who is a charlatan against his will. However, something had to be done. He looked anxiously toward the south, for he had hoped that perhaps this favorable wind might bring up clouds enough to cause some slight excitement. However, there was not so much as a shadow along the southern horizon. Not a trace of vapor was floating in all the wide, hot face of the sky. Torridon sighed.

In the meantime, all those hungrily expectant eyes were fixed upon him. He must do something, if only to kill time. He made the stallion kneel, and, scooping up a handful of dust, he raised his hand high, and released the dust in a long, thin streamer down the wind.

The voice of a medicine man shouted in the distance: “See it and look down, oh, Sky People!”

Torridon raised the other arm and for a long time stared at the pale, empty vault of the heavens above him.

“Oh, God,” said Torridon in a trembling voice, and in English, “if there is a God, help me. I don’t know what to do.”

A mighty hush had dropped upon the assembly. Their eyes were riveted with tremendous concentration upon him. In the distance he could see women holding up their frightened children on high that they might have a better view. A child screamed. The cry was stifled in its midst.

Then, glancing gloomily to the south, Torridon thought he saw a thickening of the horizon line. His heart bounded into his throat. There was no doubt. The dark line grew yet broader. It began to bulge upward in the center.

“Sky People!” cried Torridon in the Cheyenne tongue, “I command you to send the rain clouds and the rain! Instantly send them!”

At the boldness of this talk a soft groan of fear rose from the warriors and then from the masses of people beyond. Torridon shouted: “Fire! Let every gun be fired straight into the air. Standing Bull, repeat the order!”

There was no need for Standing Bull to repeat it. Instantly it was obeyed. Pistols, rifles, and all crashed their volley into the air. Wisps of smoke blew off in ragged flights. And then Torridon pointed to the south. A lofty thunderhead already was hanging in the sky.

“Swiftly, and more swiftly!” commanded Torridon. “Behold, there is the answer!”

Not until he made that gesture did a single eye glance away from him, and now all turned and beheld in the south the lofty shadow darkening the sky. There was a groan of wonder, and then followed an hysterical cry of joy. The rain was coming! Men and women held up their hands to it. Lips parted. People began to laugh.

Torridon felt a strange lifting of the heart. He waved his hand. There was instant, utter silence, save for the murmur of children, quickly hushed.

“Not clouds only,” cried Torridon, “but let there be rain, and let there be thunder and lightning!”

A sort of childish ecstasy had carried him away to these words. But now, across the rising forehead of the cloud, there was a glimmer and then a distinct streak of light.

Even the heart of Torridon was overwhelmed with awe. And from the Cheyennes there arose a cry so filled with fear that it was more like a lament than a rejoicing.

There was not so much enthusiasm in Torridon that he failed to notice that none of the braves had reloaded their weapons. Quietly he loosed the rope that bound the mare to the stallion. Follow he hoped she would, but she must not act as an impediment when he attempted to bound the black stallion across the draw.

In the meantime, the Cheyennes were beginning to give over their silence. An increasing cry of wonder and awe and joy rose from them as the cloud swept closer. It seemed apparent that it was not merely a squall. Its lofty front was crowned with great towers of the most dazzling white, based on terraces of gray, and these, in turn, were solidly founded upon a huge thickness of heavy black, impenetrable, and yet rolled fiercely upon itself. The whole mass of vapor was in the wildest turmoil, boiling up from the bottom to the top, and sinking from the top to the bottom.

As it drew closer, it piled higher and higher into the central sky until it seemed to be occupying those spaces under the sun that the dimmest stars fill by night. Yet also it was so vast a burden that the air did not seem capable of supporting that storm, and the feet of it brushed the ground. Long arms of black were thrust down, and dun-colored mist clouded the face of the prairie.

The forward bulwark of the storm crossed the sun. At once semi-twilight took the place of what had been day, blazing hot and bright. At the same time, small streamers and flags broke away from the upper section of the cloud masses and darted like flung javelins across the heavens to the north—javelins of transparent and jewel-like white that the upper sun turned into separate walls of brilliance.

Heavier arms were flung after them, darker, heavier. The whole sky to the north began to be flecked with gray and with white splashes, and then the first breath of the wind reached the watchers. It came first with a gentle sighing, and then a puff that streamed out the mane of Ashur. He, like the hero that he was, faced this towering wall of dark with pricked ears and perfect complacence. Only once did he turn his head as if to see what went on in the face of his master.

That face Torridon maintained as well as he could in a grave, almost a threatening air of command. He felt like a futile child in the presence of the deity, but he saw that it was well for him to make these grown-up children imagine that he had indeed commanded the elements.

All the time he kept an authoritative hand raised, and now and again he lifted his voice in a harsh chant, something in the tone of the chants that he had heard among the Cheyennes, though the words that he supplied were the sheerest gibberish. Covertly he was watching the Indians of his guard.

They were overcome, like the rest of the multitude. Sometimes they glanced at him, as at the raiser of the winds, but the vast majority of their attention was given to the progress of the great cloud. They drew their robes close about them. They leaned forward, as though the weight of the storm already were beating upon them.

There was only one exception, and that was big Standing Bull. Calmly reloading his rifle and a pistol that he carried in a saddle holster, he then gave his entire attention not to the wind or the clouds, but to the bringer of the rain—to poor Torridon himself. And the latter felt that he would rather have bought the indifference of that one formidable warrior than the carelessness of all the rest of the guards who were around him. He was at least glad that Standing Bull dared not leave his place at the edge of the draw.

There was no doubt that the cloud was bringing copious rain with it. The mist above the face of the prairie now deepened. It became a thick wall, as impenetrable as any part of the storm, brushing the very surface of the ground, and presently Torridon could smell the acrid yet pleasant odor of rain, newly fallen upon the parched plains. The next moment his face was stung.

A cry of approbation and incredulous delight burst from the watchers as the first, rattling volley of the rain whipped them. It was as though they had taken the beginning of this to be merely a great picture, staged with vast effects of light and shadow, but perhaps as unreal as a painting on a buffalo robe. Now they saw and felt the actuality. At their feet the dust puffed up as the great drops hammered against the earth. Upon their heads and faces the volley struck. And with a universal gesture of praise and joy, they threw their arms up to the blackening sky.

The rain was indeed upon them. The overhanging coping of the cloud now was toppling down the northern sky, shutting the whole sky away, dimming the day to evening light, and now even this light grew yet fainter. Beyond the draw were some bushes. They disappeared from sight as a gray wall swept over them.

Torridon shrank. It was like the coming of a solid wave of water. And when the weight of the rain struck him, he gasped for breath; at once, all around him was in confusion, as the half-wild horses of the guard reared and plunged, but only vaguely could he see them—figures guessed at, things out of a dream.

The very voice of the multitude was more than half lost in the roar of the rain, like the roar of a waterfall—but the chant of exultation came in vague waves toward him, split across by the neighing of the frightened horses, as the huge bulk of the cloud itself was split across by the sudden spring of the lightning. It cracked the blackened sky across from zenith to horizon, and the thunder pealed instantly afterward. The earth shook with the sound, and the ears were made to ring.

But by that flash of the lightning, in spite of the rain curtains that streamed from the sky, Torridon was aware of Standing Bull, who at last had left his post and was making straight for him.

He was roused as out of a trance. It seemed to Torridon, in that excited moment, that heaven had indeed answered a prayer from his lips, and that now he was a craven and a fool if he allowed the opportunity to pass without taking advantage of it, no matter how slight it might be. So he called to Ashur, and the stallion quivered once, and then burst into a gallop. The silver mare, who had been crowding against the black horse as though for protection, veered far to the side, and then rushed after, whinnying. But Torridon held Ashur straight for the verge of the draw.

He had marked the place before. It was not, so far as he had been able to judge, the narrowest gap from bank to bank, but the nearer bank rounded off so as to offer a sure footing, and the farther bank was low, and rounded of edge, also—such a landing place as, if a horse slipped, would not hurl him on his back, but give him a chance to scramble up, cat-like.

The thunder burst on them again, with lightning roving wildly through the noise, and, by that burst of light, he saw Standing Bull at the full gallop after him, guiding his horse with his knees, and his rifle raised with both hands.

“Ashur!” shouted Torridon.

And the good horse acknowledged the cry by hurling himself forward at full speed. They reached the edge of the draw. Excited voices shouted from either side, and it seemed to Torridon that hands were reached out to snare him, but now Ashur was away into the air, leaping without hesitation or fear, and flinging himself boldly over the gap.

What a gulf of sullen dark it was beneath them! And already the torrents of the rain had marked the stony bottom with little pools of water, like glimmering silver. They shot high up, they hung in mid-air without moving forward, as it seemed to Torridon, and then they landed with a jar on the farther bank.

Sick at heart, he felt the quarters of the stallion slip away beneath him. But Ashur recovered himself like a monster cat. He scrambled, found a footing, and lurched away across the prairie, while Torridon turned back with a savage exultation in his heart. Now let them follow if they dared.

They dared not.

On the brink behind him, he saw the great form of Standing Bull, with a rifle couched in the hollow of his shoulder. A pressure of the knee made Ashur bound to one side like a man dodging, and that instant the rifle spat fire. The bullet went wide. Not even the sing of it came close to Torridon’s ear. Still he looked back and saw the silver mare, brilliant and beautiful even in this rain-clouded light, hesitate on the verge of the chasm and then pitch forward into it.

It robbed him of half the pleasure of his escape. There was nothing beneath the sun that Roger Lincoln prized more than this splendid creature, and Torridon little liked the thought of some day facing him and confessing that he had come away and left Comanche behind him.

But now he must ride hard. There was faint danger for the moment, but when the rain lifted, if it proved to be merely a passing squall, then he might well come within range of some of their accurate rifles. And with that weapon he himself was so useless that he could not well keep them at long distance.

So he struck out a straight course to the north. He had made what inquiries he could while he was among the Cheyennes, and he had it vaguely in mind that Fort Kendry must be somewhere to the edge of the northern and eastern horizon.

“Four days and four nights,” they had said, “on the warpath. Six days traveling on a hunt.”

That was eloquent. He determined that he must keep steadily on by the North Star for four days and nights. Certainly Ashur could do as much in that time as the sturdiest Indian ponies that ever bestrode the prairies. Having made his point, he then would venture one day to the right, and, turning back, he would go straight for two days. If still Fort Kendry was not in sight, he trusted that he would be able to circle and cut for trail until he found some path that would lead him into the frontier post. That is to say, unless what he had gathered from half a dozen sources among the Cheyennes had not been all one parcel of complicated lying.

He laid his course with greater and greater temporary confidence. It was true that the first blast and fury of the wind and the rain had diminished, but, although it lifted, he could not see a sign of a horseman behind him. The rain developed into an ordinary pelting storm, not heavy enough to damage the corn, but certainly enough to give it the soaking it required.

Perhaps sheer gratitude in the breasts of the majority would prevent them from allowing a party in pursuit to start after him. But he sighed and doubted that. And then his heart swelled as he remembered that Standing Bull deliberately had fired after him. Surely in all the annals of mankind there had been no deed of more foul ingratitude. Yet, in a way, he understood. In the confused brain of Standing Bull, he appeared as a gift from heaven. The gift had no right to take wings and remove itself. Furthermore, the more valuable a gift had he proved himself—if he could cure the sick and bring the rain—the more bitterly was his loss to be regretted. No doubt, he tried to assure himself, Standing Bull had fired at Ashur, and not at Ashur’s rider.

Now that he had made peace with his conception of the warrior, he felt a certain touch of kindness for the Cheyennes. Those upon whom we have lavished our kindness are always those upon whom we shower our most pleasant recollections. And Torridon felt that he had been drinking deep of real life from the instant when he first encountered the prostrate dreamer on the river island.

He told himself that he had been a boy before, but now he was a man, and a real man. Turning his head, then, from this reverie, he was aware of a streak of gray moving across the plain. He turned back with a shout of wonder and joy, and then through the rain mist she came on bravely, tossing her head and whinnying—Comanche herself!

To Torridon, it was like the coming of a welcome and long-trusted friend. For such she was. And if he never had been able to establish in her the same sort of electric understanding that existed between him and the stallion, at least she would come when she was called, follow at his heels like a dog, and do many pretty and foolish tricks, such as sitting down and begging like a dog, with a lifted foreleg. She did a frantic circle around them, slipping in the mud as she turned, and neighing again in her rejoicing.

Then she came up beside them. Torridon could see mud on the saddle, which proved that she had rolled in the bottom of the draw. But perhaps that tumble had been the means of saving her neck. At any rate, she was unharmed, and, when the rain had sluiced the mud from her, she would be as good as new.

He changed to her at once—Ashur had borne the brunt of the fast running during the escape—and pressed along the course. Into his mind, now, flashed a picture of what he had been in the first dreary days after the loss of Roger Lincoln. He had been crushed with despair, totally overwhelmed with loneliness. Now the two horses were to him like two friends, and almost filling the place of humans. Half the terror was departed from the prairies. And if he could not find his goal, he felt that he could endure hunger with calm, and trust to the luck of the hunt to find game. He was far from expert with the rifle, but still he was much improved. He had an excellent weapon, and he had an ample store of ammunition.

That first day was a hungry and miserable one, but, in place of food and of warmth, he had the delicious sense of freedom. Though he scanned the horizon painfully again and again, he had no sight of any living thing, and he made up his mind that the Cheyennes, knowing how peerlessly he was mounted, had determined not to follow in chase.

He found no tree or even a bush large enough to give shelter, when the dark day suddenly grew blacker with the evening. The best that he could do was to make a pile of the packs and then roll in a damp blanket on the lee side of the pile. A wet couch, but nevertheless his sleep was deep.

Once or twice he roused himself, always to find that the rain was pattering in his face. With vague trouble he wondered if this exposure would bring fever on him, but afterward he slept well again, and, when he wakened, it was because of the low, anxious whinny of Ashur.

He looked up. The great, black horse was standing beside him as though on guard, and Torridon sat up in the gray of the morning. The sky was still solid gray with rain clouds, but those clouds were riding high and the horizon was much enlarged since the low and misty weather of the day before. The stallion was pointing his head to the east, his ears quivering back and forth in obvious anxiety, and Torridon stared long at that spot. It was not until he had stood up that he discovered, in the gray, faint distance, faintly moving forms, barely distinguishable.

It was enough to make his heart leap. Frantically he set about saddling and bridling, his fingers stumbling with nervous haste. But he would not allow himself the dangerous privilege of another glance until he was finally in the saddle on the mare. Ashur should be reserved for the last emergency.

In that saddle, however, when he looked again to the east, he saw that danger was rapidly sweeping toward him. A dozen or more Indians, not half a mile away, were galloping toward him. They did not come in one body, but in groups of two or three, widely separated, and strung out in a line from north to south, as though they were sweeping the plains with a great net to catch what fish they could.

He turned the head of his horse due west and sent the mare into a strong gallop. Ashur followed beside her with his enormous stride. There was no need to keep a lead rope on him. By word of mouth he could be as effectually controlled as by a bridle.

But it was only at a pace little short of her full speed that Comanche could begin to drop the wild riders behind, and that by slow degrees. The Cheyennes—he had no doubt that it was they—moved at a terrific pace, punishing their mounts remorselessly, for each warrior had three or four animals in reserve, and the horse herd was brought up in the rear by active boys, who flogged the tired ones up to the company of their fresher brothers.

Still they could not quite manage the rate of Comanche. The fine mare straightened to her work, and the Indians fell gradually off, so that Torridon felt that he could safely swing toward the north again without any danger of being caught by the wing of the enemy in that direction.

To the north he swerved, therefore, but, as he turned the head of Comanche in the new direction, he heard a sound like the screeching of ten devils. And to the west, not a hundred yards away, out of the very bosom of the plain, as it were, upstarted a full score of Cheyennes, with the formidable figure of Standing Bull prominent in the front rank. They charged down at him, yelling like so many fiends, at the full speed of their horses, the heads of the ponies shaken by their fierce efforts.

Torridon turned dumb with exquisite fear. He could call on the gray mare, but the touch of his knee and the grinding of his heel into her tender flank were enough to make her swerve and bolt back.

A bullet hummed past his head. And, as he flattened himself along the back of the horse, he heard a voice of thunder, distinct above the rushing of the hoofs, the whistling of the wind at his ears.

“Stop, White Thunder! Stop, or we will catch you with bullets! Stop, and you are safe as a brother in our hands!”

He would not stop. He had freedom, and the return to his own kind and sweet Nancy Brett all before him. Death was not so terrible as the loss of such treasures. Desperately he rode. But he could not keep on in this direction.

Straight before him the line of riders from the east was storming, drawing toward him in a group now. He could see the flogging of their arms, as they punished their horses. Their wild whoops seemed to check the pulsation of his heart.

Like a fool he had ridden into this open trap. They simply had driven him into the lion’s mouth from one side, while the other side waited to catch him. They were brushing him up, as a housewife brushes dust from the floor into a pan. He groaned with rage as well as terror.

Then he drove Comanche to the due north, or a little east of it. She had gone well before. But her speed now startled even her rider.

He thought that he could detect a note of rage rather than triumph in the shouting behind him. Certainly the noise was growing dimmer. With unflagging speed she kept on, running straight and true.

There were two Indians on the right flank of the Cheyennes who were rushing at him from the east. Those were the two on whom the greatest share of the burden of catching him must lie, now. With a falling heart he recognized in one of them that glorious young warrior, that peerless rider and rifleman, Rising Hawk. Like a bronze statue endowed with life he came, erect in the saddle, the rifle ready beneath his arm. His left hand was raised. He was shouting to Torridon to warn him to a halt, and the fugitive saw that he must play his last card now or lose the game forever.

He had Ashur running lightly beside him, turning his lordly head as though he scorned these men of the prairies. Now he drew the big horse closer with a single word. Shoulder by shoulder ran mare and stallion, and it was a simple thing to slip from one saddle to the next. It was a trick that he had practiced many and many a time before, and now his labor was well spent. He was on Ashur—and at his first call the big black leaped away from Comanche as though she had stumbled in full stride.

Like a human being afraid of being left behind, she whinnied with terror, but Ashur was leaving her with every stride. They were past Rising Hawk, now. Standing Bull’s party was far behind. Then Torridon heard the crashing of many rifles. Yet he did not hear the whistle of a single bullet. He wondered at it. Then, glancing aside, he saw Rising Hawk deliberately fire his weapon high into the air.

At last he understood. They would frighten him into surrender if they could, but they would not deliberately harm him. And, as that amazing knowledge came to him, Ashur swept him into a shallow draw just deep enough to shelter horse and rider. They raced a furious mile along its winding course, and when they left it again to bear straight north, Standing Bull and Rising Hawk and all the rest were hopelessly behind, and every moment they were being distanced more sadly. Even Comanche, with all her speed, and without a rider to burden her, was a full two hundred yards behind.

After the foolish manner in which he had allowed himself to be so nearly snared by the Cheyennes, Torridon lost his confidence. He felt no better than a boy, and an irresponsible one, at that. But two things struck him with a lasting wonder out of this adventure. The one was the blinding speed of Ashur—for never before had he seen it so tested—the other was that the Cheyennes had chosen to spare his life.

He did not try to deceive himself on that point. He had been in their hands, to all intents and purposes. If they wanted his scalp, it could have been theirs for the asking. The twenty rifles that had risen with Standing Bull to block his flight could have riddled him with bullets. But they wanted his life, not his death. And gravely, gravely did he wonder over this state of affairs.

He had the stallion and the mare to carry him, and he vowed that he would give them nothing but short halts for the next two days. Let the Cheyennes follow if they could. So he set his teeth and narrowed his eyes, and embarked upon two days of weary, continual labor and effort.

The weather broke before midday, but, though the sun came out bright and clear, the going was frightfully heavy under foot. The weight of it, however, was not all a disadvantage. He was able to get fresh meat on that account, for the antelope that at last he struck down with a lucky shot was kept in range only by the softness of the ground over which it raced. He paused to roast bits of the best of the flesh. He carried two large cuts of the antelope with him, and with them he could consider the food problem settled on that trail.

After that he voyaged through empty prairie until the fourth day out, when he struck into rolling ground, and in the distance to the north and the west there were tall mountains, dark with forests.

He came to a river, swift and mighty. When he first came to the bank, he was in time to see a drowned tree floating rapidly past and he knew that the stream was not fordable here. He would have to go higher up before it could be passed. So he turned to the left and went on for another two hours until he saw a canoe paddled in the flatter shallows of the stream by two men in frontier costume of deerskin, dark, almost, as Indians, but identified even in the distance by the sunburned paleness of their hair.

Torridon, from behind a great tree, watched them working, their paddles flashing rhythmically, and the wake dotted with small whirlpools where the wooden blades had dipped and pulled. Rapidly they approached. The craft was long and slender, made roughly, but with infinite grace. In the center was a mound, covered with a buffalo robe. A rifle lay at the hand of either paddler, but they seemed to pay no attention to the banks of the stream until—there was a sudden shout. The steersman backed water strongly, and the paddler in the bow shipped his paddle and caught up a long rifle. Lightly he balanced it, and stared straight at the tree that sheltered Torridon.

So alert and keen did the two appear that Torridon felt as though the tree were small protection, indeed. He shouted in haste: “A friend! White man!” And he cautiously exposed himself a little, waving a hand.

The man in the bow nodded. “Come out and show yourself!” he called.

Torridon slowly stepped into view.

“What might you be aiming at?” said the steersman at this.

“Fort Kendry,” said Torridon eagerly. “Do you know where it is?”

The bowsman turned and chuckled and the steersman chuckled as well. They let the canoe drift slowly ahead, the faint wake darkening the water behind them. There was not a sound. Then a fish leaped and splashed heavily, but still the two allowed their craft to float on, paying little heed to Torridon’s question, but staring at him curiously.

“Do you know?” cried Torridon. “Is it many days away?” He followed them along the bank, imploring: “For God’s sake, come to the bank and tell me where I am. I’ve been lost. . . .”

They laughed again. Either they were mad or else they were callous brutes. Then, as they began to dip their paddles once more, the bowsman called over his shoulder: “Go round the next bend!” And they swept on down the shining river.

Torridon, sick at heart, looked after them until his eyes were blinded by the sun path over the water. He had so yearned to be among his kind again, and this was a sample of their greeting.

He went back to Ashur and mounted him with a sigh. He hesitated. It might well be that the proper course was down the stream, and yet he was curious about what might lie around the next bend. He sent Ashur forward at a dog-trot, the mare following leisurely, picking at tempting tufts of grass, here and there. And so, finally, he rounded the broad bend of the stream and through the margin of trees he saw before him a dazzling flash, as though a powerful glass had been focused in his eyes. He rushed on through the trees.

It was the reflection from a windowpane, and not a quarter of a mile away he saw the tall rock walls of a little fort, with three small cannon topping the walls—each gun hooded to the muzzle with tarpaulin. Around the knees of those strong bastions were scattered huts, lean-tos, dog tents, Indian lodges.

Fort Kendry!

Torridon clasped his hands together. He was very young. And his sensitive soul had been long and hardly tried. He had been through the long valley of death, as it were, and now he hardly resisted the impulse to weep, but let the hot tears tumble down his face. Sobs rose and choked him. These, out of awe of the forest silence, he kept down.

But no, that silence already was broken. Out of the distance came the brisk and ringing noise of a hammer, rapidly applied, and on the heels of it a dog began to howl—a scream of fear and pain, that died in a succession of rapid yelps.

Torridon sighed again. He almost forgot that this was the happy goal; he almost forgot that beautiful Nancy Brett was somewhere in that collection of tents and houses, or in the solid circumference of the fort itself. Between her and him there existed a thick veil of brutal humanity, and this he must try to brush aside. It seemed to poor Torridon, indeed, that the dog had cried out to say the thing that was in his own soul.

Then stifled laughter came from nearby. He saw two men peering out at him, their faces convulsed with mirth. Brutal, savage faces he thought them, more brutal than the face of any Indian. He gasped at the sight of them, and, as he showed fear, a leering joy gleamed in the eyes of the larger of the pair. He thrust himself out into the trail and laid a hand on the bridle of Torridon’s horse.

“What’re you blubberin’ about?” he asked. “Who are you, and where are you goin’?”

“And where,” asked the second fellow, stepping forward in turn, but keeping a bit to the rear, “did you get them horses? Who give ’em to you?”

“Who’d you steal ’em from, you better ask?” said the first of the worthies. “Get down here on the ground and let me have a look at that horse.”

Torridon shuddered as he heard the command. Many a time a man passed through many perils, through many dark moments, and the cup was dashed from his lips at the very moment when he had won to it.

“D’you hear?” bellowed the first speaker, and laid a hand of iron upon the knee of Torridon. “Down off that horse, or I’ll pick you outten the saddle and throw you in the river, you sneakin’ thief. That’s what you are. I can see it by the coward look of you. Get out of the saddle! Move!”

The miracle had happened to Torridon before, more than once, and, when the supreme moment came mind and forethought vanished. A sheer physical instinct took command. So it did now. Into his hand winked a long, slender, double-barreled pistol, and he thrust the barrels straight into the throat of the other.

“Sufferin’ jack rabbits . . .” began the big man. He paused, mouth agape. His eyes, round and wide, read the face of Torridon as a child reads indecipherable print in a primer.

There was the other, however, to consider. He was circling cat-like to the rear.

“Keep your friend back,” said Torridon, “or I’ll give you one barrel and try the other on him. Tell him to get here behind you, where I can keep an eye on him.”

To his own amazement, the thing was done. Like two awed children they stood before him.

“Now,” said Torridon, wicked pleasure coming to him, “tell me if I am a horse thief?”

The first man, rascal though he might be, had recovered from the first shock. He was able to grin down the pistol barrels. “Son,” he said, “you got the bill of sale right there in your hand. I didn’t see it at first. Matter of fact, I guess you got two bills of sale.”

“Then drop your rifles and back up to the trees,” ordered Torridon.

It was done, in turn. They let the long guns fall—then slowly moved back, watching Torridon cautiously all the time.

“Only, will you mind tellin’ me,” asked one of them, “how you filled your hand? Did you have that gun up your sleeve all the while?”

He said it wistfully, and Torridon could not help smiling. Then, at a touch of his knee, Ashur moved forward. The gray mare cantered beside him. He rounded the next turn among the trees and, glancing back, saw that the pair of ruffians had not moved. He was not overjoyed as he went on, but he had an odd interest in the knowledge that those heavy, trustworthy rifles, even in practiced hands, had proved but clumsy protectors at close range, where speed was of avail.

Then his heart began to lift. No doubt he was riding into a brutal society, but it might be that he would find in himself a sufficient manhood to face the members of it down.

He was entering the town. There were no streets. Between the houses the ways were simply surface soil, beaten to a muddy pie by rain and the cutting of ten thousand hoofs. The horses dislodged one foot at a time, with a loud, popping sound. The pedestrians going here and there wore to a man strong boots, clotted with the mud. And altogether it seemed to Torridon the dreariest little patched and crazy quilt-work village that ever he had seen.

And yet it was Fort Kendry.

A thousand times he had heard that name. It had been ringing through the stories that came in from the frontier. It was one of those last outposts of civilization, hardly civilized itself. Men said that the rapid river that slid past Fort Kendry ate a man a day—and nothing done to the murderers. Still he had some doubt, and, calling to a bearded, little, ratty-looking man, he asked if this were indeed Fort Kendry. The latter, in reply, merely gaped, and then broke into loud laughter and went on his way.

He went farther, until he saw a squaw standing with arms akimbo in the door of a miserable shack. He asked of her in English. She merely stared insolently at him, eying him with contempt, and the two splendid horses with curiosity. He tried her in Cheyenne.

She started convulsively and sprang forward. To the bare ankles she sank in the mud. Yes, this was Fort Kendry. Did he come from the Suhtai? Had he been with them long?

Yes, Roger Lincoln was at the fort. He lived inside the fort itself. Had he known in the Cheyenne tribe a great warrior, Yellow Wolf, who . . . ?

Yes, Samuel Brett was here, and living with his niece in the big, square house just outside the gates of the fort. So she poured out answer and question intermixed. But he did not wait to satisfy her curiosity. He merely waved his hand to her and pressed forward. He was, indeed, too choked by the wild fluttering of his heart to be capable of speech.

He went toward the square house that had been pointed out to him. A big man with a square-cut beard was chopping wood beside the building. His brawny arms were bared to the elbow; the axe flew like a feather in his grasp. There was something deeply familiar to Torridon in the appearance of the stalwart. And he called in a trembling voice to know if this were the house of Samuel Brett.

The other turned, axe poised for a stroke. Slowly he allowed it to sink to the ground as he stared, and then he shouted: “By grab, it’s the thief!”

And dropping the axe, he snatched up a rifle. Resistance was not in the mind of Torridon. In blank terror he whirled the horse and fled, and heard the click of the rifle hammer, followed by no explosion, then the furious growling of the other.

Before him the gate of the fort was wide open—a double gate, in fact, with men leaning on their tall rifles nearby. Through the gate he fled, and drew rein inside, a badly frightened youth. Loud and angry voices demanded the reason for thus pushing into their midst, without leave begged. Stern faces closed around him, and a hand was laid on the bridle rein.

“Roger Lincoln . . .” was all he could stammer. “Is Roger Lincoln here?”

“And what d’you want with Roger Lincoln?” asked one while another exclaimed: “By gravy, it’s Comanche!”

“Comanche, you fool! She’s a half a hand taller’n that gray runt!”

“I tell you, I know her. It’s her. Didn’t I match my pinto ag’in’ her last year? Didn’t she leave him like he was hobbled?”

A crowd of the idle and curious was gathering, and suddenly, through that crowd, Torridon was aware of a tall man stepping lightly forward, his long hair gleaming over his shoulders, a jacket of the most beautiful, white deerskin setting off his fine torso.

“Roger!” shouted Torridon. “Oh, Roger Lincoln!”

Would he, too, have a rifle and curses with which to greet him? No, no! For Roger Lincoln came with a leap. He took Torridon in those slender, mighty hands of his, lifted him to the ground, and held him at arm’s length, by the shoulders.

“My boy,” said Roger Lincoln softly, “this is the greatest and the happiest and the finest day of my life. Lad, how did you come back to me from the dead?”

They sat in Lincoln’s room in the fort. Fort, indeed, by courtesy, for it was held by a trading company and not by federal troops. Hundreds of miles to the east the formal authority of the government ended. With an armed rabble, the fur company held this outpost; according to the whim of the moment it made its laws. Half hotel and store, and half fortress, it ruled the wild country around it.

They had interchanged stories eagerly. The tale of Roger Lincoln was simplicity itself. Out hunting, and not three miles from his starting place, he had been snatched up by a wandering band of Crows, far from their own hunting grounds. Death and scalping would have been the end of him, had it not chanced that the chief knew Lincoln to be a famous man and decided on accepting a ransom. They proceeded straight to the vicinity of Fort Kendry, and there Roger Lincoln had no difficulty in procuring a score of good horses to pay for his scalp.

That done, he secured the best mount be could find and spent two days in letting the Crows learn that no bargain could be altogether one-sided. He had pursued them, caught two stragglers, sent them to their long account, and returned, eager to get back to the spot where he had left the boy.

But, of course, he found that Torridon was gone. The letter placed on the site of the campfire was gone, also. And after hunting in vain for sign that he could follow, Roger Lincoln had returned to the fort, hoping that his young friend might be able to win through to it, even against heavy odds.

Next came the tale of Torridon, hastily sketched in, to which Roger Lincoln listened with increasing joy. The trip to the Sky People filled him with laughter and excitement. And, finally, he caught the hand of Torridon and exclaimed: “You’re such big medicine to that pack of wolves that they’ll never give you peace! They’ll be trying to steal you again, one of these days.”

“Don’t say it,” murmured Torridon. “It makes me faint and weak to hear you.”

The frontiersman rested his chin on the palm of his hand and regarded the boy with a smile and a nod. “The same Paul,” he said. “The same Paul Torridon. Almost like a girl until it comes to the pinch . . . and then like a pair of tigers.”

“No, no!” exclaimed Torridon. “Ah, Roger, if you knew how happy I am to be with you again, and how many times I’ve prayed to have a man like you with me.”

Here they were interrupted by a knock at the door and no less a person than the commander of the fort appeared, a man of middle age, shrewd and hard-faced, to tell Roger Lincoln that he was accused by Samuel Brett of harboring a horse thief.

“It’s the case of Ashur,” said Lincoln. “Come down with me and we’ll face Brett. He’s not a bad kind of a man. But they’ve written to him that the stallion was stolen, and in a way he was. Now’s the time to face it out.”

He would not wait to hear the protest of Torridon, who had no wish to meet that grim axe man who so nearly had put an end to his days not long before. But down went Lincoln, Torridon, and the post captain together, and found Brett in a high rage. He repeated his accusation in a loud voice. Torridon was a sneak and a thief and a member of a cut-throat family. And he had repaid the kindness of the Bretts by slipping away with their finest horse.

The post captain heard this speech with a growing darkness of brow. “The law ain’t overworked in these parts much,” he declared. “But a horse thief I hate worse than a snake . . . it’s one reason that I hate every damned Indian I ever seen. And if this Torridon has stole the black stallion . . . back he goes to Brett. And, besides, I’ll make an example of him that’ll . . .”

“Hold on a half minute.” Roger Lincoln smiled. “Let me tell you that I found Torridon locked in the Brett cellar. They intended to cut this lad’s throat the next day. We had to fight our way out, and, once out, we had to take the best horse on the place to be sure of getting away from the murderers. The horse that we took is the black one. We’ll admit that. But I think the circumstances alter the case a good deal, don’t you?”

“The damned lyin’ . . .” began Samuel Brett.

“Wait!” interrupted the commandant sharply. “Lincoln, you give me your word that you’ve told me the straight of it? He took the horse to escape bein’ murdered?”

“I give you my sacred word.”

“Then the horse belongs to him by rights,” said the other, and, refusing to listen to another word, he turned upon his heel and hurried away, leaving Samuel Brett half apoplectic with fury.

Roger Lincoln had drawn Torridon to one side. “Now, man,” he said, “while I keep Sam Brett here and try to hold him, get to Brett’s house. You’ll find Nancy there, I think. Go fast, my boy.” He turned to Samuel Brett. “Brett,” he said, “if you think that you have a fair claim to that black horse, will you sit down in my room and talk it over with me? Paul Torridon and I don’t want to figure as horse thieves.”

“I’ll talk it over here!” roared Samuel Brett. “Or I’ll fight it over here. As for rights, I can show you . . .”

Torridon heard no more. He had slipped away through the crowd and hastened through the open gates. Evening was covering Fort Kendry. Lamps were beginning to glimmer behind the windows, and the smell of frying meat made the air pungent as Torridon came again to the big square house and heard a woman’s voice calling: “Nancy! Oh, Nan!”

From the distance: “Yes, Aunt Mary!”

Oh, heart of Paul Torridon, how still it stood. He hastened through the gloom toward the trees and saw a form issuing from them with arms filled with greenery. He told himself that he could tell her by the mere pace at which she walked, the lightness of her step, and the sense of joy that went before her like radiance before a lamp. She came quickly on until she was aware of his shadow standing against the twilight gloom, and she stopped with a faint cry.

Then, cheerfully: “Are you the new man that Uncle Samuel sent in from Gannet?”

He did not answer. He could not. He heard her catch a frightened breath, but, instead of running from him, she came slowly forward, a small step and a halt, and a step again. The greenery slipped from her arms to the ground. He heard a small whisper, but to him it was all the vital, human warmth of song, and then she was in his arms.

From the door a long nasal wail was calling: “Nancy! Oh, Nan, where are you?”

And Torridon whispered: “She’s here. Oh, Nancy, Nancy, how beautiful you are.”

And she: “Silly dear, how can you see me?”

“I can see your goodness and your truth,” said Torridon. “And I . . . I . . .”

“Nancy!” wailed the caller. “Are you comin’?”

“Never, never,” whispered Torridon.

“I have to take these in,” whispered Nancy in reply. “I’ll be out again in a flash. Wait here . . . I’ve got to go in . . . she’d never stop calling me. . . .”

“How long will you be, Nan?”

“I don’t know. Not half a minute. Not two seconds.”

“Nan, I feel as though I’ll never see you again.”

“Ah, but you will.”

“Kiss me once.”

“There, and there.”

She swept up her fallen load and ran into the brightness of the doorway.

Torridon heard her saying: “I stumbled on the path and quite lost my breath.”

“Why, honey,” said her aunt, “you look all done in. Set down and rest yourself a minute, and . . .”

And a hood of darkness that instant fell over the head of Torridon, was jerked tightly over his mouth by mighty hands, and strong arms caught him up, crushing him with their power.

He felt himself being carried rapidly away, and faint he heard a voice murmur, beside the robe that stifled him: “Will you be quiet and make no cry, White Thunder?”

“Yes,” he gasped in the Cheyenne tongue.

Instantly the hood was jerked from his head. They were standing under the edge of the trees, he in the huge arms of Standing Bull. He knew that ugly profile even in that faint light.

“No harm, little brother,” murmured Standing Bull. “You are more safe now than you would be in your own teepee. I, Standing Bull, have spoken.”

He allowed Torridon to stand, but kept a tight hold on him.

And now the shadow of the girl ran out from the lighted door of the kitchen. Torridon saw her, as the Cheyenne drew him back into the shadow of the trees, saying: “Rising Hawk has gone to bring your horse. We would not take you back on a common pony. And all shall be as you wish in the tribe. You shall be a great medicine man among us, White Thunder. You shall be rich, with horses and scalps and squaws.”

The trees closed between Torridon’s back-turned face and the silhouette of the girl, but faintly, far off, he heard a cautious voice calling: “Paul! Paul!” And then a little louder, in a voice broken with fear and grief: “Paul Torridon! Where are you?”

A rustling passed among the trees before them. They came into a clearing and there were a dozen horses in waiting, and the gleaming, half-naked forms of several warriors. They closed in a whispering knot around Torridon. He did not hear their voices, for faintness dimmed his ears with a dull roaring through which he still seemed to hear the sad voice of a girl calling for Paul Torridon.

And suddenly he groaned: “Standing Bull, if I have been true to you and helped you in bad times, be my friend now. Take your knife and strike it into my side, but don’t carry me back to the Cheyennes.”

“Peace, peace, peace,” said Standing Bull, like a father to a sick child. “Peace, little brother. Happiness is not one bird, but many. We shall catch them for you, one by one. We shall fill your hands with happiness. Behold. Here is Rising Hawk, and the black thunder horse is with him.”

Suddenly Torridon was raised and placed in the saddle.

Standing Bull stood close beside him. “If you make a loud shout,” he said, “I give you the thing for which you ask . . . this knife through the heart. But go with us quietly, and everything shall be well. You shall be to me a son and a brother and a father, and to all the warriors of the tribe. Rising Hawk, watch the rear. I ride in front with White Thunder. Ah, ha. This night Heammawihio has remembered us.”

And with his feet lashed beneath the saddle, and a lariat running from the neck of the black stallion to the saddle bow of Standing Bull, Torridon was carried out from the settlement. The lights gleamed more dimly through the trees and went out altogether, and presently there was the faint glimmer of water to their left.

They were well embarked on the homeward way—the out trail for Torridon, from which he could see no return. And he raised his head to the broad and brilliant sky, where every star shone brightly, and he wondered why God had chosen to torment him. The sense of Roger Lincoln’s faith and truth rode at his side like a ghost, and the beauty of Nancy Brett, but they had been shown to him only to be taken away.

There were no tears in the eyes of Torridon. He had found a grief too great for that.

Standing Bull put the horses to full gallop. They began to rush forward like the wind. Trees and brush and the shining river poured past them, but the calm stars hung unmoved in their silent places above him.