another gaze reassured him, and having satisfied himself he asked
a young man: "Brother, you say there are as many more soldiers up north
by the Yellowstone?"

"There are as many more--I saw them with my own eyes, and Blow Cloud
over there has seen as many to the east. He could not count them."

For an hour the spies watched the white columns before the Fire Eater
turned his pony, and followed by his young men disappeared in the
timber.

Upon his arrival at the big camp the Fire Eater addressed the council:

"I have just come five smokes from the south, and I saw the white
soldiers coming. I could not count them. They crawl slowly along the
valley and they take their wagons to war. They cannot travel as fast as
our squaws, but they will drive the buffalo out of the land. We must go
out and fight them while our villages lie here close to the mountains.
The wagon-soldiers cannot follow the women's pack-horses into the
mountains."

The council approved this with much grunting, and the warriors swarmed
from the villages--covering the country until the coyotes ran about
continually to get out of their way. No scout of the enemy could
penetrate to the Indian camps. The Indians burned the grass in front of
the on-coming herds; they fired into the enemy's tents at night, and as
the pony-soldiers bathed naked in the Yellowstone ran their horses over
them. They would have put out many of the white soldiers' fires if the
wagon-guns had not fired bullets which burst among them.

But it was all to no purpose.

Slowly the great snakes crawled through the valleys and the red warriors
went riding back to the village to prepare for flight.

One morning the Fire Eater sat beside his lodge fire playing with his
young son--a thing which usually made his eyes gleam. Now he looked
sadly into the little face of the boy, who stood holding his two great
scalp braids in his chubby hands. He knew that in a day or two the camp
must move and that the warriors must try to stop the Yellow-Eyes. Taking
from his scalp a buckskin bag which contained his bat-skin medicine he
rubbed it slowly over the boy's body, the child laughing as he did so.
The sun was barely stronger than the lodge fire when from far away on
the hills beyond the river came a faint sound borne on the morning wind,
yet it electrified the camp, and from in front of the Fire Eater's
tent a passing man split the air with the wolfish war-yell of the
Chis-chis-chash. As though he