ce,
and this was his first trip in December. He congratulated himself on
having his back to the wind on the fifty-mile ride up the valley. A
norther was abroad over the earth, and, sweeping down from arctic
wildernesses, seemingly gathered power as it came. It crossed two vast
States in a single night and fell upon the Fort Smith reservation with
terrible fury about ten o'clock in the morning.

Crane's Voice did not get his mail-sack till twelve, but his ponies were
fed and watered and ready to move when the bag came. He did not know
that it contained a letter to warm the heart of his hero, the Captain,
but he flung the sack into his cart and put stick to his broncos quite
as manfully as though the Little Father waited. The road was smooth and
hard and quite level for thirty miles, and he intended to cover this
stretch in five hours. Darkness would come early, and the snow, which
was hardly more than a frost at noon, might thicken into a blizzard. So
he pushed on steadily, fiercely, silently, till a sinister dusk began to
fall over the buttes, and then, lifting his voice in a deep, humming,
throbbing incantation, he sang to keep off spirits of evil.

Crane's Voice was something of an aristocrat. As the son of Chief Elk he
had improved his opportunities to learn of the white man, and could
speak a little English and understand a good deal more than he
acknowledged, which gave him a startling insight at times into the words
and actions of the white people. It was his report of the unvarying
kindliness and right feeling of Captain Curtis which had done so much to
make the whole tribe trust and obey the new agent.

Crane's Voice was afraid of spirits, but he shrank from no hardship. He
was proud of his blue uniform, and of the revolver which he was
permitted to wear to guard the mail. No storm had ever prevented him
from making his trip, and his uncomplaining endurance of heat, cold,
snow, and rain would have been counted heroic in a military scout. His
virtues were so evident even to the cowboys that they made him an
exception by saying, "Yes, Crane is purty near white," and being
besotted in their own vanity, they failed to see the humor of such a
phrase in the mouth of a drunken, obscene, lawless son of a Missouri
emigrant. As a matter of fact there were many like Crane in the tribe,
only the settlers never came in personal contact with them.

Crane found his road heavy with drifts as he left the main valley and
bega