ater find expression in the most extended physical effort.

Thus during the days did White Otter eat and sleep, or lie under
the cottonwoods by the creek with his chum, the boy Red Arrow--lying
together on the same robe and dreaming as boys will, and talking also,
as is the wont of youth, about the things which make a man. They both
had their medicine--they were good hunters, whom the camp soldiers
allowed to accompany the parties in the buffalo-surround. They both
had a few ponies, which they had stolen from the Absaroke hunters the
preceding autumn, and which had given them a certain boyish distinction
in the camp. But their eager minds yearned for the time to come when
they should do the deed which would allow them to pass from the boy to
the warrior stage, before which the Indian is in embryo.

Betaking themselves oft to deserted places, they each consulted his own
medicine. White Otter had skinned and dried and tanned the skin of the
little brown bat, and covered it with gaudy porcupine decorations. This
he had tied to his carefully cultivated scalp-lock, where it switched in
the passing breeze. People in the camp were beginning to say "the little
brown bat boy" as he passed them by.

But their medicine conformed to their wishes, as an Indian's medicine
mostly has to do, so that they were promised success in their
undertaking.

Old Big Hair, who sat blinking, knew that the inevitable was going to
happen, but he said no word. He did not advise or admonish. He doted
on his son, and did not want him killed, but that was better than no
eagle-plume.

Still the boys did not consult their relatives in the matter, but on the
appointed evening neither turned up at the ancestral tepee, and Big Hair
knew that his son had gone out into the world to win his feather. Again
he consulted the medicine-pouch and sang dolorously to lull the spirits
of the night as his boy passed him on his war-trail.

Having traveled over the tableland and through the pines for a few
miles, White Otter stopped, saying: "Let us rest here. My medicine says
not to go farther, as there is danger ahead. The demons of the night are
waiting for us beyond, but my medicine says that if we build a fire the
demons will not come near, and in the morning they will be gone."

They made a small fire of dead pine sticks and sat around it wrapped
in the skins of the gray wolf, with the head and ears of that fearful
animal capping theirs--unearthly enough to fr