"They are no worse than the men," replied Albert. "A lot of
warriors are gambling, too."

A group of the men were gathered on a little green farther on,
and the brothers joined them, beginning to share at once the
interest that the spectators showed in several warriors who were
playing Woskate Painyankapi, or the game of the Wands and the
Hoop.

The warriors used in the sport canyleska (the hoop) and cansakala
(the wands). The hoops were of ash, two or three feet in
diameter, the ash itself being about an inch in diameter. Every
hoop was carefully marked off into spaces, something like the
face of a watch.

Cansakala (the wands) were of chokecherry, four feet long and
three fourths of an inch in diameter. One end of every wand was
squared for a distance of about a foot. The wands were in pairs,
the two being fastened together with buckskin thongs about nine
inches in length, and fastened at a point about one third of the
length of the wands from the rounded ends.

A warrior would roll the hoop, and he was required to roll it
straight and correctly. If he did not do so, the umpire made him
roll it over, as in the white man's game of baseball the pitcher
cannot get a strike until he pitches the ball right.

When the hoop was rolled correctly, the opposing player dropped
his pair of wands somewhere in front of it. It was his object so
to calculate the speed and course of the hoop when it fell it
would lie upon his wands. If he succeeded, he secured his points
according to the spaces on each wand within which the hoop lay--an
exceedingly difficult game, requiring great skill of hand and
judgment of eye. That if was absorbing was shown by the great
interest with which all the spectators followed it and by their
eager betting.

"I don't believe I could learn to do that in ten years," said
Albert; "you've got to combine too many things and to combine
them fast."

"They must begin on it while they're young," said Dick; "but the
Indian has a mind, and don't you forget it."

"But they're not as we are," rejoined Albert. "Nothing can ever
make them so."

Here, as in the house of the Akitcita, nobody paid any attention
to the two boys, but Dick began to have a feeling that he was
watched, not watched openly as man watches man, but in the
furtive dangerous way of the great wild beasts, the man-eaters.
The feeling grew into a conviction that, despite what they were
doing, everybody in the camp--warrior, squ