pectful greeting. Dejected, motionless, he endured the hot sunshine
like an Oriental Yoghi or a man deadened by some narcotic drug.

Gently, almost timidly, Primeau addressed him. "Slohan, this white man
has come a long way to see you. He wishes to talk with you about the
Sitting Bull and of the days of the buffalo."

At last the old man turned and lifted his bloodshot eyes and uttered in
a husky whisper, a few words which changed Primeau's whole expression.
He drew back. "Come away!" he said to me.

While we were walking toward our team he explained. "Slohan is mourning
the death of his little grandson. Long time he has been there wailing.
His voice is gone. He can cry no more. His heart is empty. He will not
talk with us."

What a revelation of the soul of a red warrior! Hopeless, tragic,
inconsolable, he was the type of all paternity throughout the world.

Primeau went on, "I told him of you and I think his mind is turned to
other things. I asked him to come to see you this afternoon. Perhaps he
will. Perhaps I have lifted his mind from his sorrow."

All the way down the valley I pondered on the picture that grandsire had
made there in the midst of that desolate valley.

Primeau told me of his grandson. "He was a handsome little fellow. I
can't blame the old man for weeping over his loss."

Slohan was a redoubtable warrior. He had been the leader of Sitting
Bull's bodyguard, he was accounted a savage, and yet for forty-eight
hours he had been sitting ceaselessly mourning for a child, crying till
his voice was only a husky whisper. Nothing that I had ever seen typed
the bitterness of barbaric grief more powerfully than this bent and
voiceless old man.

* * * * *

Late in the afternoon the mourner came in view, riding on a pony,
without a saddle, his face still very sad, but not entirely despairing.
His mind, in working backward to the splendid world of the past, the
world in which his chief had played such heroic and stirring parts, his
heart had been comforted--or at any rate lightened.

Although clothed in the customary rags of the mourner, his hair was
neatly brushed and braided, and he met my wife with gentle grace. There
was something tragic in his dim glance, something admirable in his low
words of greeting.

We gave him food and drink, and then while we all sat on the earth in
the scant shade thrown by Primeau's building, he began to talk, slowly,
hesitantly of the p