He led Anthony to another irregular hut, where the boy was placed side by side with the over-dressed person in the semi-religious style of suit. The friar was needed to baptize a sick papoose. The Père Louis' tolerance and sense of duty so affected Anthony that his awkward arms were very gentle. He was filled with pity and quite forgot the grotesque figure beside him in helping the tiny dying creature under his hands. He could not find it in his heart to object when the grateful friar named the child Antoinette in honor of her pale-face godfather.
Father Louis went promptly to the next business in hand, "Do you, Anthony, please keep the children out of mischief for a minute while I pack," he said. Anthony, half crying in sorrow for the expiring child and half laughing in disgust at the living ones, got his pocket compass. The magnetic needle was the one thing that scared the little Indians into decent behavior. Their fathers had told them it was a magic spirit which guided the white men over lands where no trails led. All the Sioux, large and small, quaked before its quivering point.
By its threat the meddlesome hands were warned away from the friar's sleeves whose pocket cuffs were the only trunks he carried. He was going with Anthony to join a concourse of the Sioux hunters setting out in pursuit of buffalo.
News that the migrating herds were coming their way had set the Indians, now very short of food, into a frenzy of preparation. Away they all went in a bedlam, men and women, children and dogs, to the shores of the Great River, where they rioted in the camps by night and chased the buffalo on the outlying plains by day.
Every woman had her own pottery cooking-vessel. Savory stew was served at any hour in the twenty-four. Surplus meat was dried in the smoke of her smudges as she "jerked" it for future use.
Each child took part in this annual event. The tenth little Indian, the smallest hunter that ever stood in moccasins, had his own arrows and a buffalo calf for practice.
Pelts piled up like bales. Accau counted them by dozens.
If any one had told Anthony that in the beginning of the twentieth century a North American Indian of the Carlisle School would hold the world's record for all-around athletic prowess he certainly would have nodded that he believed it. "Day after day," he said, "the lithe Narrhetoba, with a single bow, set his nimble feet to the sport of running down a buffalo and his deft hands to the game of slaying it by means of a stone-tipped arrow. That is more than I can do."
It was too easy for that active chieftain. He was bored with the old-fashioned exercise. He longed for the white man's steel and the new sensations to come in using a gun.
The friar and Anthony proposed to him, "Allow us to take a canoe and go down to the mouth of the Wisconsin in search of the traders the Sieur La Salle had promised to send after us." Both Narrhetoba and Ouasicoude agreed to do this. So Anthony and Père Louis slipped quietly away.