His bow was of strips of elk-horn polished white, cemented with glue of buffalo hoof, and backed with deer sinews to give it spring. Three months had been required to make it. There was none better.
His lance had a deadly two-edge steel blade, stained with the dried blood of Sioux and Arikaree and Cheyenne and Assiniboin. The six-foot ashen shaft was strung with eagle feathers.
His shield was the hide from a buffalo's neck, hardened with hoof glue. Its center was a pole-cat skin; its edges were fringed with eagle feathers and antelope hoofs that rattled.
His battle-axe was of hammered iron blade and skull-pecker, with ash handle four feet long and deer-sinew grip. Eagle feathers and fur tufts decorated it.
His war-club was a round stone wrapped in raw-hide at the end of a cow-tail, like a policeman's billy.
After his portrait was painted, Mahtotohpa spread out his wonderful robe, and told the stories of the twelve battles and the fourteen scalps pictured on it by his own hand; and these stories included that of his Arikaree lance, and Cheyenne knife.
The lance story came about in this way. In the shaft of the lance, near the blade, there had been set an antelope prong; and when Mahtotohpa posed for his portrait, with the butt of the lance proudly planted on the ground, he carefully balanced an eagle feather across this prong.
"Do not omit to paint that feather exactly as it is," he said, "and the spot of blood upon it. It is great medicine, and belongs to the Great Spirit, not to me. I pulled it from the wound of an enemy."
"Why do you not tie it to the lance, then?"
"Hush!" rebuked Mahtotohpa. "If the Great Spirit had wished it to be tied on, it would never have come off."