Squaw Charley shook his head.
"On the Powder?"
There was a silent assent.
"The soldiers pursued; maybe they surprised you—which?"
To answer, the Indian rose slowly. With one of Lancaster's crutches he raked out some ashes and levelled them upon the hearth-stones. Next, across them, stooping and using a finger, he drew a varying line that showed the trend of a stream. Far up toward its source, in a bend, he placed bits of bread from the table to indicate the lodges of his tribesmen. Slivers from a stick showed that the tepees had been set thickly in a grove of tall cottonwoods. White beans, from a filled pan on the floor near by him, stood for the warriors that had fought. His fingers moved more quickly as, by means of a handful of corn that Dallas had put in his leather pouch, he planted the United States troops on three sides of the Indian campground, and moved them forward to the attack.
Adroitly he manœuvred the opposing forces, with advancing here and retreating there, groans when the white men felt the fight too keenly, low whoops to picture an Indian gain, little puffs of the breath to betoken flying bullets. The onlookers saw the battle as it had raged about the tepees. And the flickering lantern, as Squaw Charley moved it in a semicircle, told them that the firing began at daybreak and continued until dark.
All at once he changed the picture. Twelve beans were rapidly counted out and laid in rows, and he mourned softly over these to show that they were slain warriors. Five kernels of corn—a line of pale-faced dead—were placed beside the bean rows. This done, he covered the lantern with the grain-sack and leaned back against the logs.
"Aye, aye," cried David Bond, sadly. "Twelve braves and five troopers perished! Seventeen souls went to their Maker to mark the greed of the white man and the yearning to harry off the red! Why do the Indians not stay in peace and quiet upon the lands set apart for them, and not go abroad stealing and slaughtering? Why do my own people not give back to their brothers the country that is rightly theirs?"
Once more Squaw Charley stooped forward and, resting his weight on one hand, traced the return march of the troopers to a crossing of the Missouri, where the command had buried its dead; from there he drew the route southward, to the ferry and Fort Brannon. Here, he stuck the splinters in a circle to picture the stockade below the barracks. At last, rising, he drew his blanket close about him, put the grain-sack over his tangled hair and, with a parting look toward Dallas and the evangelist, went slowly out.
Perfect quiet followed the pariah's going. His recital of the conflict, dumb though it was, had powerfully stirred the little audience. For, as he had proceeded with his crude mimicry, the imagination of the others had filled in the scenes he could not sketch.