“Come out and you will see the white soldiers.” He mounted and followed, and sitting there amid the mountain tangle he saw his dreams come true. The traders and the talking men had not lied about the numbers of their people, for his eye did not come to the rear of the procession which wound up the valley like a great snake. There were pony-soldiers, walking-soldiers, guns on wagons, herds of the white men’s buffalo, and teams without end. The Fire Eater passed his hands across his eyes before another gaze reassured him, and having satisfied himself he asked a young man: “Brother, you say there are as many more soldiers up north by the Yellowstone?”
“There are as many more—I saw them with my own eyes, and Blow Cloud over there has seen as many to the east. He could not count them.”
For an hour the spies watched the white columns before the Fire Eater turned his pony, and followed by his young men disappeared in the timber.
Upon his arrival at the big camp the Fire Eater addressed the council:
“I have just come five smokes from the south, and I saw the white soldiers coming. I could not count them. They crawl slowly along the valley and they take their wagons to war. They cannot travel as fast as our squaws, but they will drive the buffalo out of the land. We must go out and fight them while our villages lie here close to the mountains. The wagon-soldiers cannot follow the women’s pack-horses into the mountains.”
The council approved this with much grunting, and the warriors swarmed from the villages—covering the country until the coyotes ran about continually to get out of their way. No scout of the enemy could penetrate to the Indian camps. The Indians burned the grass in front of the on-coming herds; they fired into the enemy’s tents at night, and as the pony-soldiers bathed naked in the Yellowstone ran their horses over them. They would have put out many of the white soldiers’ fires if the wagon-guns had not fired bullets which burst among them.
But it was all to no purpose.
Slowly the great snakes crawled through the valleys and the red warriors went riding back to the village to prepare for flight.
One morning the Fire Eater sat beside his lodge fire playing with his young son—a thing which usually made his eyes gleam. Now he looked sadly into the little face of the boy, who stood holding his two great scalp braids in his chubby hands. He knew that in a day or two the camp must move and that the warriors must try to stop the Yellow-Eyes. Taking from his scalp a buckskin bag which contained his bat-skin medicine he rubbed it slowly over the boy’s body, the child laughing as he did so. The sun was barely stronger than the lodge fire when from far away on the hills beyond the river came a faint sound borne on the morning wind, yet it electrified the camp, and from in front of the Fire Eater’s tent a passing man split the air with the wolfish war-yell of the Chis-chis-chash. As though he had been a spiral spring released from pressure, the Fire Eater regained his height. The little boy sat briskly down in the ashes, adding his voice to the confusion, which now reigned in the great camp in a most disproportionate way. The old chief sprang to his doorway in time to see a mounted rider cut by, shrieking, “The pony-soldiers are coming over the hills!” and disappear among the tepees.
With intense fingers the nerved warrior readjusted his life treasure, the bat-skin, to his scalp-lock, then opening his war-bags, which no other person ever touched on pain of death, he quickly daubed the war paint on his face. These two important things having been done, he filled his ammunition bag with a double handful of cartridges, tied his chief’s war-bonnet under his chin, and grasping his rifle, war-ax and whip, he slid out of the tepee. An excited squaw hastily brought his best war-pony with its tail tied up, as it always was in these troublesome times. The Fire Eater slapped his hand violently on its quarter, and when he raised it there was the red imprint of the hand of war. The frightened animal threw back its head and backed away, but with a bound like a panther the savage was across its back, a thing which in tranquil times the old man was not able to do.