Henry, appealing alike to his curiosity and its gratification. He was
launched upon the great wandering and he found in it both the glamour
and the reality that he wished, the reality in the rivers and the
forests and the prairies that he saw, and the glamour in the hope of
other and greater rivers and forests and prairies to come.

Indian summer was at hand. All the woods were dyed in vivid colors, reds
and yellows and browns, and glowed with dazzling hues in the intense
sunlight. Often the haze of Indian summer hung afar and softened every
outline. Henry's feeling that he was one of the band grew stronger, and
they, too, began to regard him as their own. His freedom was extended
more and more and with astonishing quickness he soon picked up enough
words of their dialect to make himself intelligible. They took him with
them, when they turned aside for hunting expeditions, and he was
permitted now and then to use his own rifle. Only six men in the band
had guns, and two of these guns were rifles the other four being
muskets. Henry soon showed that he was the best marksman among them and
respect for him grew. The Indian whom he knocked down was slightly gored
by a stag when only Henry was near, but Henry slew the stag, bound up
the man's wound and stayed by him until the others came. The warrior,
Gray Fox, speedily became one of his best friends.

Henry's enjoyment became more intense; all the trammels of civilization
were now thrown aside, he never thought of the morrow because the day
with its interests was sufficient, and from his new friends he learned
fresh lore of the forest with marvelous rapidity; they taught him how to
trail, to take advantage of every shred of cover and to make signals by
imitating the cry of bird or beast. Once they were caught in a
hailstorm, when it turned bitterly cold, but he endured it as well as
the best of them, and made not a single complaint.

They came at last to their village, a great distance west of the
Mississippi, a hundred lodges perhaps, pitched in a warm and sheltered
valley and the boy, under the fostering care of Black Cloud, was
formally adopted into the tribe, taking up at once the thread of his new
life, and finding in it the same keen interest that had marked all the
stages of the great journey.

The climate here was colder than that from which he had come, and
winter, with fierce winds from the Great Plains was soon upon them. But
the camp which was to remain there