Chapter IV

From beneath the skirt of the teepee a young prairie chicken emerged—no ordinary prairie chicken, but an absurd thing dressed in a little pair of trousers and a scrap of scarlet blanket. Hector grinned. The chicken stood irresolute, looking wildly 'round for a favourable avenue of escape. While it hesitated, two small brown hands and arms appeared from under the teepee and frantically searched the air. The chicken danced away. A dishevelled head next wriggled its way into the open air, two bright black eyes flashed a pitiful appeal to Hector, a soft voice cried:

"Oh, pony-soldier, please, pony-soldier—catch my prairie chicken—catch my baby!"

Burly Corporal MacFarlane, Hector's companion in this stroll through the Assiniboine encampment, smiled heavily but made no move. Hector started off in pursuit.

The ground was rough, his boots and spurs were very heavy, the agility of the baby was amazing and the crowded teepees were serious obstacles. Hector dashed 'round and 'round, close behind. He tripped, scraped his hands, stumbled up, heard MacFarlane's encouraging "For'ard on!" made another desperate effort, crashed over a box and emerged from the wreckage triumphant, the baby shrilling in his arms.

"Got him, Mac!" he called. "Now, where's the owner of this independent bird?"

He was at the teepee in a moment, but of the owner nothing could be seen. Two years and more had taught him that most Indian women were intensely shy with white men. He had learnt something of their languages from Martin Brent—the knowledge was useful in his work—and by this time could speak them fairly fluently. The little squaw had been overcome by shyness but was not far away.

He summoned her in her own tongue:

"Here is your prairie chicken, O chieftain's daughter! Come and get your prairie chicken!"

No answer came.

"O chieftain's daughter," he cooed seductively, "do not keep the poor pony-soldier waiting. And your baby!"

The charm brought results in time. Two hands were thrust from the door of the teepee, the fingers stretched to take the bird, but of the lady herself nothing was visible.

Hector was disappointed.

"Why don't you come out?" he coaxed. "Surely you will thank the pony-soldier—the poor pony-soldier who ran so far to bring your baby back?"

She came.

Hector had leisure now to confirm first impressions. She was very pretty, in her Indian way. Her gentle eyes, clear and limpid as a fawn's, glanced shyly upward at his own. Her lips, on which the smiles were trembling, were red petals from the prairie rose. The two thick plaits in which her hair was braided were of that rich blue-black which is the exclusive birthright of Indians and Latins. She wore an elaborately beaded buckskin dress, which truly marked her as the daughter of a chief. The rare beauty of her body, unspoilt by heavy work, the looseness of her dress could not conceal. Hector could not place her age, but she was delightfully young; and that was good enough.

"Take it," he said gravely, handing her the bird.

Taking it, her small fingers mingling with his, she spoke at last, a swift smile bringing light to her face, like a rainbow in sad skies.

"Thank you, pony-soldier, for catching my baby."

Serious, then, both were, till all at once the humour of the situation struck her and her smile flashed back to break in little rills of laughter. She laughed like a child, with her whole body. Hector burst out laughing, too, his spirit echoing back her mood. MacFarlane, behind, growled peevishly. A moment more and her shyness was back again. Her pet on her breast, a final word of thanks on her lips, she vanished, leaving Hector standing there.

"You laugh with my daughter, my son? That is good—for to laugh is to be happy."

Hector turned, surprised.

Before him stood a chief—a minor chief, as chiefs went, but as fine a figure as the plains could boast of, the very soul of chieftainship. He was tall and spare, straight and majestic as a pine, dressed in a barbaric splendor which became him to perfection. But his greatness was written mainly in his face. The wisdom of a hundred medicine men, made rich by long years of life, was in it, with strength, true strength—which is utterly devoid of arrogance or vanity—the calmness of a meditative mind, vast dignity and high authority. And his long white hair and mighty war-bonnet framed it all with glory.

"You laugh with her—is it not so?" he said.

"She has a cheerful heart," Hector answered, finding his voice.

"And you," the chief asserted, "you have one, too. But kind also—few white men would run to catch the pet belonging to a little squaw." He smiled. "You are interested in us? So you walk through the camp to see us?"

"Yes," said Hector.

"That is good, for we are brothers, you and I, though I call you 'son.' You must come and see us when you will. We are—you know it?—of the Assiniboines. My name is Sleeping Thunder, and my daughter's name is Moon-on-the-Water. So you will find us."

Moon-on-the-Water! She was like her name.

"I will come and see you soon, Sleeping Thunder," replied Hector.

As they walked away, MacFarlane threw in a ponderous comment.

"Funny old man! Girl's pretty, though—for an In'jun. You made a hit there, Hec'!"

Sleeping Thunder's camp was only one of many gathered together that day in the Fort Macleod country, where the Indians were to meet the Queen's officials to make a treaty. Hector's division was there on escort duty.

The years had brought swift and sweeping changes. To-day Hector was a senior sergeant, though still in the early twenties, knowing his work inside out, intimate with the red men, an expert catcher of criminals and particularly of whiskey-traders, his special game. Honest, hard, dangerous work had put the triple chevrons on his arm. And drawing nearer every day, though still a dreary distance off, the first faint flashes of the higher light he sought were slowly opening before his eyes.

The Police had wrought great things in the few years behind them. The whiskey traffic had been much reduced and the old system of trading posts was gone, entirely and forever. The effect had been to convert the Indian to ways of peace. This in turn had brought the settler in who, up till now, had barely dared to show a timid nose in the country south of the Red Deer. Already the plains were dotted with homesteads, and cattle roamed along the grass lands soon to become tenanted by the immense herds of prosperous ranches. More settlers and more settlers were pouring out from the East. Before they could be accommodated, some title to the lands they wanted must be given them. The red men claimed the whole of the Northwest Territories. They were willing to relinquish them in return for certain privileges. So treaties were made with the great tribes in turn. And now the tribes of the Macleod district had come together to make their treaty too.

III

"You have a love for our ways and an interest in our customs?" asked Sleeping Thunder. "You admired our warriors?"

"Yes," Hector answered.

They were standing with Moon outside the chief's teepee on the last day of the treaty celebrations.

"Would you like to see more of them? You have not really seen us until you have seen the Sun Dance, which we hold each year in the summer."

"I want to see much more," said Hector. The romance of the things he had recently witnessed had fascinated him. "I would like to see the Sun Dance."

"Then hear me. If you do not mind camping with Indians, come to us next year and I will show you. I will teach you all our practices, our stories and legends and more of our language. It is too late this year, but next year—. I will send a messenger to tell you where to come and when. I would like you to come—and so would Moon."

"You would like me to come?" Hector asked, smiling at Moon.

She flashed a demure answer with her eyes.

An attractive little thing, this Indian girl!

"Then I will come," said Hector, seizing the opportunity.

With that promise they parted.

In June of the following year, Hector, in frontier outfit; his uniform laid aside, rode out to meet Sleeping Thunder and to see the Sun Dance.

MacFarlane saw him off at the stables.

"Who is she, Hec'?" he asked, raising his bushy brows and smiling meaningly. "That pretty little squaw, isn't it?"

Hector, whacking the pack-pony into motion and touching up his horse, looked down and smiled in return.

"You will have your little joke, won't you, Mac?" he said. "The girl's got nothing to do with it."

"Hasn't she?" MacFarlane mocked. "Oh, no—not at all!"

On the trail Hector headed southward, thinking of many things.

His interview with Sub-Inspector Lescheneaux, a wizened, bird-like French-Canadian commanding Hector's troop, when asking for leave, had been a droll but pleasing affair, ending very flatteringly.

"No leave ov h'absence since we first cam' out 'ere," the worthy little man had ruminated; "one ov bes' N.C.O.s in dis de-vision, oui; 'as don' more to stamp out d'illicit wheesk-ey traffic den any oder sergeant I know; desires leave ov h'absence for one for'd'night; vraiment, 'e deserve it, too. Eef Inspect-eur Denton 'as no objection, Sergeant, you go by all means. I t'ink, Sergeant-Major Whee-taker, we say dis request granted, eh? Good luck, Sergeant—bon voyage. Tiens!"

The Sergeant-Major, too, had made Hector happy.

"He's right—right, by God, he is! Since that day at 'Red-hot' Dan's, Adair, yes, and before that, I marked you for a winner. You've certainly earned your little rest—damn my buttons, yes!"

This was true, all of it. Hector had worked hard. He had acquired a reputation in the Force as one of the smartest hunters of whiskey-runners it possessed.

But there were flies in the ointment and snakes in the grass. He had not yet been able, for all his hard work, to put down the traffic in the district allotted to him. Most of the traders and runners had long since fallen into his hands. Yet there was still a great deal of trading the source of which he could not trace. Some underground current was pouring through the district carrying liquor to the Indians. During the past few months he had made a particularly stern effort to dam the flood. Success would temporarily reward him. Then, suddenly, without warning, the stream would bubble out in some new spot—in twenty spots at once. The mystery troubled him. The hold it had secured on him made itself obvious in the fact that, though he had fixedly resolved to forget it for a fortnight, it had him now.

But the glorious appeal of the morning soon drove it from his mind. It was full June, the sky was a light blue dome, golden at bottom, where the sun blazed, and flecked elsewhere with baby clouds drifting before the lazy wind. The long grass, clean, shining, went rippling to the edges of eternity. The larks piped in the hollows and the little gophers sat up to watch him as he passed. Hector was young, the day was young, and troubles fly light as thistledown over the heads of Youth when the time of the year is June.

In a minute or two he was singing a jibing song beloved by the Force, that band of happy warriors who would not take things seriously:

So pass the tea and let us drink
To the guardians of the land.
You bet your life it's not our fault
If whiskey's contraband!

When he sighted Welland's place, where he planned to spend the night, his roving fancy clicked sharply back to roost and turned to Welland.

The friendship between them, though it had prospered in the years now gone, had never reached real intimacy. But Welland's fortunes had been amazingly strengthened during recent times. Prosperity seemed to come to him unsought There was something almost strange in it. Probably he had money invested elsewhere. As men count wealth in other places, he was not yet a Crœsus, of course, but a great improvement was palpably evident. Several new sheds and stables; acres of cultivated ground; cattle and horses; two wagons in the yard; the shack extended and freshly painted—these were obvious additions to the real and personal property owned by Welland when the Police first came to the country. Had he fallen heir to Aladdin's lamp? How, otherwise, had he acquired all this so easily?

As Hector rode slowly down upon the homestead through the velvet dusk, a strange thing happened. From the house he heard an awesome, chilling sound—dull, measured, heavy,—like blows on raw beef. And this sound was punctuated by several low screams, each whimpering, one by one, into a moan. Completely baffled, he dismounted near the stables, raised the 'long yell' that common courtesy demanded, and waited.

Welland came out, peering through the gloom.

"It's me, Joe," Hector called. "Adair!"

"Oh, that you, Hec'?" Welland responded with genuine pleasure. "Good boy! What brings you here this time o' night?"

Hector told him, still wondering——

"Leave, eh? Going down to Milk River, eh? Fine! Fine! Of course you'll spend the night here, and feed, too. Come on! I'll take your horses."

When they entered the house, Lizzie was there, smiling cheerily enough on Hector, whom she knew well by this time—Lizzie, in a new striped skirt, sharing her man's prosperity.

"It couldn't be," Hector decided. Thereupon he placed what he had heard aside, in one of those innumerable pigeonholes of memory, where facts and incidents are unconsciously stowed away till wanted.

In the morning Welland gave him surprise No. 2.

"Hec', you're interested in the suppression of the liquor traffic," he asserted. "I don't know if you've come across this arrangement, though. It's one of the neatest things devised yet."

He handed him that common relic of the prairie, a buffalo skull.

"The horns, as you know, are hollow. The tips have been cleverly cut off and made into caps, to act as corks. You pour in the whiskey and put the caps on. Perfectly tight—perfectly safe! Load a cart up with buffalo skulls, same as all the Indians are doing now, mix a few of these among 'em and you can get your stuff into any reserve in the country without being caught. Who'd suspect a wagonload of buffalo skulls?"

Hector examined it, brain busy.

"Where did you get it?"

"One of those In'juns you arrested about two weeks ago gave it to me. I did him a good turn once. Want it?"

"I might get it when I come back. Here's how!"

"All right. Good hunting!"

Trouble brooded on Hector's face as he turned his horses out into the morning.

He was miles on his way before the holiday spirit came back to him and the buffalo skull went bang into its pigeon-hole.

Milk River, now! And Moon! And Sleeping Thunder!

The nights between the days which witnessed the Sun Dance Hector thought wonderful, for it was then that Sleeping Thunder opened his heart. Each night they sat beside the crimson fire, before the teepee, under a splendid canopy of purple strewn with stars. The silence of the plains, with only the howl of a lonely wolf by way of contrast, was about them as they sat, their voices took on mystic qualities unknown to them by day, the air was tense with hidden forces. Nothing stirred and there was nothing to divert them but the flitting form of Moon, attending the fire.

Hector spoke of one thing which dominated his mind, puzzling him.

"At this meeting, Sleeping Thunder, I have seen two ceremonies: one the making of a brave, the other the renewal of the vows of wives and maidens. To me these are as far apart as sun and earth. The first, to me—and I speak for all white men—is barbarous and cruel. But the second is very beautiful. Why do we find these things in the same race and practised by one people?"

Sleeping Thunder, answering him, revealed the entire sum and substance of his Indian philosophy:

"Because you find a thing you think terrible standing side by side with something that is beautiful, you are puzzled. But there is nothing strange in this. It is true to Nature. In one man, to say nothing of peoples, you will find great evils dwelling with much that is good. In the white race, as in the Indian, practices that are beautiful and practices that are ugly walk hand in hand. The white man's law, shielding the weak from the strong, is beautiful. The white man's gambling dens and saloons are not. The Indians, my son, are not the only people possessed at once by good and evil!"

The old man smiled, his bright eyes fixed on Hector.

"But is it evil——" he resumed, "this ceremony of making warriors? What, after all, do we most admire in a man? White men and red alike, we especially admire strength, courage and fortitude. You are content to await the great test of action to prove that your comrades possess these qualities. Till then you credit them with all the strength, courage and fortitude they should rightly have. But we Indians, we are not so easily satisfied. We demand that a young man prove himself before the hour of action. When danger rises in your very path and Death awaits you with his arrow on the string, that is no time, we say, to test a man for the first time. Your safety, perhaps your life, depends, in that moment, on the courage, strength and fortitude of those about you. Then surely you should see that those about you are brave and strong and hardy before entrusting either life or safety to their keeping? That is wisdom, my son, that is right. The boy must show that he is fit to go before we take him with us. Therefore, we try him in the Sun Dance. If he succeeds—then, we need have no further doubts. If he fails—the lives of men are saved and no needless risks are encountered by the remainder of the tribe. The test is severe? Yes; because, otherwise, it would be worthless. But no lasting injury results. What, then, are a few drops of blood, a little agony?

"My son, the Indian does not shun, he embraces the opportunity of that ceremony. Does it not show that he has courage, strength and fortitude, which crown a man with glory as his antlers crown the caribou?

"Now in a woman—what do we admire?" The chief's voice grew tender. "Is it gentleness, is it obedience? These things we honour, yes. But greater than these, and higher than them all, is Purity! White men and red alike, that is the thing we would have especially in woman. We are ourselves weak and corrupt. We feel in our hearts the need of something to help us to be better. So we ask that help from these, our women. We make of Purity a torch of light and put that torch in the hands of those we love, to guide us through the storm. We would have our women—" here he swept a hand towards the skies—"as high above us, as white and clear as yonder stars, to show the way, as they do. We would have them like the peaks of the World's Backbone, which you call the Rocky Mountains, looking always, like them, upon our deeds, landmarks, like them, to guide us by day, as the stars guide us by night, crowned with that virtue, Purity, as the peaks are crowned with spotless snow and, like those peaks, so glorious, so unchanging, so near the Great Spirit—nearer, far, than we!—that only to look on them fills our hearts with awe and wonder. So we would have our women.

"But here again the white and red man part. Your women shrink from a public declaration such as ours endure. Unlike you, we do more than teach our women purity. We ask them to dedicate themselves to purity before the eyes of all. We hold that virtue up before them as a thing to be prized. Then is the shame which follows any falling from the heights made trebly terrible. So do our women learn that it is for them to be true to the laws of the Great Spirit and leave love-making to the male—as with birds, animals, fishes, so must it be with men and women."

Moon, in the shadows, stirred restlessly.

"Both these ceremonies, my son, are beautiful, for they glorify strength, courage and fortitude in men, purity in women. Then there is nothing strange in the observance of these ceremonies by one and the same people. I wonder—do you understand now?"

"I think—I think I see," said Hector.

He looked for Moon; but she had disappeared.

When the great meeting was over, Hector said goodbye to Sleeping Thunder.

"You go from us, my son," the old man exclaimed, extending his hand, "knowing far more of my people than when you came. The Indian's ways and the white man's ways are not the same and it is not good that one should take to himself the habits of the other. The Great Spirit made us different and so we should remain. For one, vast cities, such as you have pictured to me—buildings of stone—sheltered lives; for the other, open plains—teepees—and roving lives that are wild and free. But it is good that we should know one another, since, though you are white and we are red, we are not less brothers. For this, at least, you will not regret your visit, O my son, and I will always hold you as a friend—in time of need, especially, a friend. And now you ride back to your people and no-one knows when we will meet again. But we shall meet again, be sure of that!"

Hector smiled.

"I hope so, Sleeping Thunder," he said; then added regretfully, "Tell Moon I am troubled that she was not here to say goodbye. Tell her I do not understand."

Pain momentarily darkened the chief's face. Then he also smiled.

"Who shall read the mind of a woman?" he questioned. "Go your way. I will tell her."

Again they shook hands. Hector wheeled his horses and rode away.

An Indian watched his going from a clump of bushes on the outskirts of the camp, satisfaction gleaming in his eyes.

From the shadows, night after night, he had sullenly watched the stranger talking with the chief outside the teepee, watched him sitting with the father of Moon.

Loud Gun was glad to see the last of the white man.