The Sheriff folded the telegram and putting it back in his pocket, stepped up on a box near the hotel door.
"I want to call for a hundred volunteer citizens to go hunt this girl," he announced.
A minute later, all that was left of Rockvale was the buildings and the women, children and old men who stood watching a cloud of dust blotting the sunset glow and listening to the retreating clatter of a flying cavalcade.
Sikes kept the office open late. At 7 o'clock he telephoned to Mrs.
Haines at the Double Cross:
"What does he say?" she cried.
"Just one word—Comin'," said Curt in an aggrieved voice. "He could've sent ten words fer the same price," he grumbled.
Red Snake was one of the younger chiefs of the Sioux. He was too young to have had a share in the bloody last stand of his race in their Montana wilderness; but he was old enough to have watched the dwindling of spirit and power among them for twenty years.
And every day of watching kindled new hate in the breast of the Indian. In him the spirit of his fathers had left the old unquenchable belief in the Day of Restoration, when, by some supernatural intervention, the Indians would return to their lands, the lands revert to their primeval state, and civilization be lost in the obliterating wilderness.
The officers of the Agency had had trouble with Red Snake on several occasions. Twice he had started out at the head of war parties and had been caught just in time to prevent bloodshed among the isolated settlers. But of late he had been docile and peaceful. The new disturbances—the occasional shooting of a cowboy and the petty stealing of cattle dated from the beginning of the sway of a new medicine man in Red Snake's principal village of Shi-wah-ki.
His name was of many syllables in the native language, but he was known as Big Smoke. He was a young Indian who had spent some years among the whites in the Southwest, had made a pretense at getting an education, but had reverted violently to the life and faith of his fathers. Big smoke had predicted to Red Snake the coming of the Great White Queen, who would empower the arms of the red man to overthrow the whites and would make him again master of his rightful lands.