, and before long his father's as well.

The old men, his contemporaries, have often related to me how Red
Cloud was always successful in the hunt because his horses were so well
broken. At the age of nine, he began to ride his father's pack pony upon
the buffalo hunt. He was twelve years old, he told me, when he was
first permitted to take part in the chase, and found to his great
mortification that none of his arrows penetrated more than a few
inches. Excited to recklessness, he whipped his horse nearer the fleeing
buffalo, and before his father knew what he was about, he had seized one
of the protruding arrows and tried to push it deeper. The furious animal
tossed his massive head sidewise, and boy and horse were whirled into
the air. Fortunately, the boy was thrown on the farther side of his
pony, which received the full force of the second attack. The thundering
hoofs of the stampeded herd soon passed them by, but the wounded and
maddened buffalo refused to move, and some critical moments passed
before Red Cloud's father succeeded in attracting its attention so that
the boy might spring to his feet and run for his life.

I once asked Red Cloud if he could recall having ever been afraid, and
in reply he told me this story. He was about sixteen years old and had
already been once or twice upon the warpath, when one fall his people
were hunting in the Big Horn country, where they might expect trouble at
any moment with the hostile Crows or Shoshones. Red Cloud had followed a
single buffalo bull into the Bad Lands and was out of sight and hearing
of his companions. When he had brought down his game, he noted carefully
every feature of his surroundings so that he might at once detect
anything unusual, and tied his horse with a long lariat to the horn of
the dead bison, while skinning and cutting up the meat so as to pack
it to camp. Every few minutes he paused in his work to scrutinize the
landscape, for he had a feeling that danger was not far off.

Suddenly, almost over his head, as it seemed, he heard a tremendous
war whoop, and glancing sidewise, thought he beheld the charge of an
overwhelming number of warriors. He tried desperately to give the usual
undaunted war whoop in reply, but instead a yell of terror burst from
his lips, his legs gave way under him, and he fell in a heap. When he
realized, the next instant, that the war whoop was merely the sudden
loud whinnying of his own horse, and the charging army a ba