“What is the red man’s Medicine?” asked the young wife, as she smoothed her hair, put a string of bright beads around her neck, and wound a red sash round her waist.
The old woman shook her head, a curious half-mystic light in her eyes, her body drawn up to its full height, as though waiting for something. “It is an old Medicine. It is of winters ago as many as the hairs of the head. I have forgotten almost, but it was a great Medicine when there were no white men in the land. And so it was that to every woman’s breast there hung a papoose, and every woman had her man, and the red men were like leaves in the forest—but it was a winter of winters ago, and the Medicine Men have forgotten; and thou hast no child! When Long Hand comes, what will Mitiahwe say to him?”
Mitiahwe’s eyes were determined, her face was set, she flushed deeply, then the colour fled. “What my mother would say, I will say. Shall the white man’s Medicine fail? If I wish it, then it will be so: and I will say so.”
“But if the white man’s Medicine fail?”—Swift Wing made a gesture toward the door where the horse-shoe hung. “It is Medicine for a white man, will it be Medicine for an Indian?”
“Am I not a white man’s wife?”
“But if there were the Sun Medicine also, the Medicine of the days long ago?”
“Tell me. If you remember—Kai! but you do remember—I see it in your face. Tell me, and I will make that Medicine also, my mother.”
“To-morrow, if I remember it—I will think, and if I remember it, to-morrow I will tell you, my heart’s blood. Maybe my dream will come to me and tell me. Then, even after all these years, a papoose—”
“But the boat will go at dawn to-morrow, and if he go also—”
“Mitiahwe is young, her body is warm, her eyes are bright, the songs she sings, her tongue—if these keep him not, and the Voice calls him still to go, then still Mitiahwe shall whisper, and tell him—”