hundred tom-toms. They recognized the Fire Eater, but
no Indian calls another by his name.

Raising his hand with the dignity which Indians have in excess of all
other men the Fire Eater said: "Brothers, it makes my heart big to look
at you again. I have been dead but I came to life again. I was sent back
by the gods to complete another life on earth. The Thunder Bird made
the Yellow-Eyes kill all my band when we went against the Absaroke. My
medicine grew weak before the white man's medicine. Brothers, they
are very strong. Always beware of the medicine of the traders and the
beaver-men. They are fools and women themselves but the gods give them
guns and other medicine things. He can make them see what is to happen
long before he tells the Indians. They can see us before we come and
know what we are thinking about. They have brought me back to my people,
and my medicine says I must be a Chis-chis-chash until I die again.
Brothers, I have made my talk."

VII. Among the Pony-Soldiers

The burial scaffold of the Fire Eater's father had rotted and fallen
down with years. Time had even bent his own shoulders, filled his belly
and shrunken his flanks. He now had two sons who were of sufficient age
to have forgotten their first sun-dance medicine, so long had they been
warriors of distinction. He also had boys and girls of less years, but
a child of five snows was the only thing which could relax the old man's
features, set hard with thought and time and toil.

Evil days had come to the Buffalo Indians. The Yellow-Eyes swarmed in
the Indian country, and although the red warriors rode their ponies
thin in war, they could not drive the invaders away. The little bands of
traders and beaver-men who came to the camps of the Fire Eater's boyhood
with open hands were succeeded by immense trains of wagons, drawn by
the white man's buffalo. The trains wound endlessly toward the setting
sun--paying no heed to the Indians. Yellow-Eyes came to the mountains
where they dug and washed for the white man's great medicine, the
yellow-iron. The fire boats came up the great river with a noise like
the Thunder Bird--firing big medicine-guns which shot twice at one
discharge.

The Fire Eater, with his brothers of the Chis-chis-chash, had run off
with the horses and buffalo of these helpless Yellow-Eyes until they
wanted no more. They had knocked them on the head with battle-axes
in order to save powder. They had burned the grass in