ing in a house, in a bed, to wearing shoes, to eating the white
man's food; but the blood of the prairies leaped in his veins at the
sight of the great tepee, with its dry sod floor spread with wolf-skins
and ancient buffalo hides. He flung himself on to the furs and the
grass, his fingers threading themselves through the buckskin fringes
that adorned old Beaver-Tail's leggings.

"Father," he cried out, in the quaint Cree tongue, "father, sire of my
own, I have learned the best the white man had to give, but they have
not changed me, or my heart, any more than they could change the copper
tint of my skin."

Old Beaver-Tail fairly chuckled, then replied, between pipe puffs, "Some
of our Cree boys go to school. They learn the white man's ways, and
they are of no more use to their people. They cannot trap for furs, nor
scout, nor hunt, nor find a prairie trail. You are wiser than that,
Little Wolf-Willow. You are smarter than when you left us, but you
return to us, the old people of your tribe, just the same--just the same
as your father and grandfather."

"Not quite the same," replied the boy, cautiously, "for, father, I do
not now hate the North-West Mounted Police."

For answer, old Beaver-Tail snarled like a husky dog. "You'll hate them
again when you live here long enough!" he muttered. "And if you have any
friends among them, keep those friends distant, beyond the rim of the
horizon. I will not have their scarlet coats showing here."

Wisely, the boy did not reply, and that night, rolled in coyote skins,
he slept like a little child once more on the floor of his father's
tepee.

For many months after that he travelled about the great prairies,
visiting with the Government Indian Agent many distant camps and Cree
lodges. He always rode astride a sturdy little buckskin-colored cayuse.
Like most Indian boys, he was a splendid horseman, steady in his seat,
swift of eye, and sure of every prairie trail in all Saskatchewan. He
always wore a strange mixture of civilized and savage clothes--fringed
buckskin "chaps," beaded moccasins, a blue flannel shirt, a scarlet silk
handkerchief knotted around his throat, a wide-brimmed cowboy hat with a
rattlesnake skin as a hatband, and two magnificent bracelets of ivory
elks' teeth. His braided hair, his young, clean, thin, dark face, his
fearless riding, began to be known far and wide. The men of the Hudson's
Bay Company trusted him. The North-West Mounted Police loved him. The