At last the old man turned and lifted his bloodshot eyes and uttered in a husky whisper, a few words which changed Primeau's whole expression. He drew back. "Come away!" he said to me.
While we were walking toward our team he explained. "Slohan is mourning the death of his little grandson. Long time he has been there wailing. His voice is gone. He can cry no more. His heart is empty. He will not talk with us."
What a revelation of the soul of a red warrior! Hopeless, tragic, inconsolable, he was the type of all paternity throughout the world.
Primeau went on, "I told him of you and I think his mind is turned to other things. I asked him to come to see you this afternoon. Perhaps he will. Perhaps I have lifted his mind from his sorrow."
All the way down the valley I pondered on the picture that grandsire had made there in the midst of that desolate valley.
Primeau told me of his grandson. "He was a handsome little fellow. I can't blame the old man for weeping over his loss."
Slohan was a redoubtable warrior. He had been the leader of Sitting Bull's bodyguard, he was accounted a savage, and yet for forty-eight hours he had been sitting ceaselessly mourning for a child, crying till his voice was only a husky whisper. Nothing that I had ever seen typed the bitterness of barbaric grief more powerfully than this bent and voiceless old man.
Late in the afternoon the mourner came in view, riding on a pony, without a saddle, his face still very sad, but not entirely despairing. His mind, in working backward to the splendid world of the past, the world in which his chief had played such heroic and stirring parts, his heart had been comforted—or at any rate lightened.
Although clothed in the customary rags of the mourner, his hair was neatly brushed and braided, and he met my wife with gentle grace. There was something tragic in his dim glance, something admirable in his low words of greeting.