“No,” returned the Jolly Doctor, “I am guiltless of acquaintance with him. The story came to me from one of our Indian agents.”
While this talk went forward, Sioux Sam, who understood English perfectly and talked it very well, albeit with a guttural Indian effect, and who had listened to the Jolly Doctor’s story with every mark of interest, was saying something in a whisper to the Old Cattleman.
“He tells me,” remarked the Old Cattleman in reply to my look of curiosity, “that if you-alls don’t mind, he’ll onfold on you a Injun tale himse’f. It’s one of these yere folk-lore stories, I suppose, as Doc Peets used to call ’em.”
The whole company made haste to assure Sioux Sam that his proposal was deeply the popular one; thus cheered, our dark-skinned raconteur, first lighting his pipe with a coal from the great fireplace, issued forth upon his verbal journey.
“An’ this,” said Sioux Sam, lifting a dark finger to invoke attention and puffing a cloud the while, “an’ this tale, which shows how Forked Tongue, the bad medicine man, was burned, must teach how never to let the heart fill up with hate like a pond with the rains, nor permit the tongue to go a crooked trail.”
CHAPTER III.—HOW FORKED TONGUE WAS BURNED.
The time is long, long ago. Ugly Elk is the great chief of the Sioux, an’ he’s so ugly an’ his face so hideous, he makes a great laugh wherever he goes. But the people are careful to laugh when the Ugly Elk’s back is toward them. If they went in front of him an’ laugh, he’d go among them with his stone war-axe; for Ugly Elk is sensitive about his looks.
Ugly Elk is the warchief of the Sioux an’ keeps his camp on the high bluffs that mark the southern border of the Sioux country where he can look out far on the plains an’ see if the Pawnees go into the Sioux hills to hunt. Should the Pawnees try this, then Ugly Elk calls up his young men an’ pounces on the Pawnees like a coyote on a sage hen, an’ when Ugly Elk gets through, the Pawnees are hard to find.