the tongues--these shall go into
other mouths than thine and mine, old man."

Ebbits nodded his head and wept silently.

"There be no one to hunt meat for us," she cried, turning fiercely upon
me.

There was accusation in her manner, and I shrugged my shoulders in token
that I was not guilty of the unknown crime imputed to me.

"Know, O White Man, that it is because of thy kind, because of all white
men, that my man and I have no meat in our old age and sit without
tobacco in the cold."

"Nay," Ebbits said gravely, with a stricter sense of justice. "Wrong has
been done us, it be true; but the white men did not mean the wrong."

"Where be Moklan?" she demanded. "Where be thy strong son, Moklan, and
the fish he was ever willing to bring that you might eat?"

The old man shook his head.

"And where be Bidarshik, thy strong son? Ever was he a mighty hunter,
and ever did he bring thee the good back-fat and the sweet dried tongues
of the moose and the caribou. I see no back-fat and no sweet dried
tongues. Your stomach is full with emptiness through the days, and it is
for a man of a very miserable and lying people to give you to eat."

"Nay," old Ebbits interposed in kindliness, "the white man's is not a
lying people. The white man speaks true. Always does the white man
speak true." He paused, casting about him for words wherewith to temper
the severity of what he was about to say. "But the white man speaks true
in different ways. To-day he speaks true one way, to-morrow he speaks
true another way, and there is no understanding him nor his way."

"To-day speak true one way, to-morrow speak true another way, which is to
lie," was Zilla's dictum.

"There is no understanding the white man," Ebbits went on doggedly.

The meat, and the tea, and the tobacco seemed to have brought him back to
life, and he gripped tighter hold of the idea behind his age-bleared
eyes. He straightened up somewhat. His voice lost its querulous and
whimpering note, and became strong and positive. He turned upon me with
dignity, and addressed me as equal addresses equal.

"The white man's eyes are not shut," he began. "The white man sees all
things, and thinks greatly, and is very wise. But the white man of one
day is not the white man of next day, and there is no understanding him.
He does not do things always in the same way. And what way his next way
is to be, one cannot know. Always does the Indian do the one thing in
t