bands stood in awe of them. With
the exception of the chief, the people had never been inside of the
second gate at Laramie. They traded through a hole in the wall, and
even then the bourgeois Papin thought he played with fire. Their haughty
souls did not brook refusal when the trader denied them the arrangement
of the barter.

The tribe encamped, and got rid of what ponies, robes and meats it could
dispose of for guns and steel weapons, and "made whisky." The squaws
concealed the arms while the warriors raged, but the Chis-chis-chash in
that day were able to withstand the new vices of the white men better
than most people of the plains.

On one occasion, the Bat was standing with a few chiefs before the
gateway of the fort. M. Papin opened the passage and invited them to
enter. Proudly the tall tribesmen walked among the _engages_--seeming to
pay no heed, but the eye of an Indian misses nothing. The surroundings
were new and strange to the young man. The thick walls seemed to his
vagabond mind to be built to shield cowards. The white men were created
only to bring goods to the Indians. They were weak, but their medicine
was wonderful. It could make the knives and guns, which God had denied
to the Bat's people. They were to be tolerated; they were few in
number--he had not seen over a hundred of them in all his life.
Scattered here and there about the post were women, who consorted with
the _engages_--half-breeds from the Mandaus and Dela-wares, Sioux and
many other kinds of squaws; but the Chis-chis-chash had never sold a
woman to the traders. That was a pride with them.

[Illustration: 08 Nothing but cheerful looks followed the Bat]

The sisterhood of all the world will look at a handsome man and smile
pleasantly; so nothing but cheerful looks followed the Bat as he passed
the women who sat working by the doorways. They were not ill-favored,
these comforters of the French-Creole workmen, and were dressed in
bright calicos and red strouding, plentifully adorned with bright beads.
The boy was beginning to feel a subtle weakening in their presence. His
fierce barbarism softened, and he began to think of taking one. But he
put it aside as a weakness--this giving of ponies for these white men's
cast-offs. That thought was unworthy of him--a trade was not his wild
way of possessing things.

He stood quietly leaning against a door on Papin's balcony, observing
the men laboring about the enclosure, his lip curling upward