The Indians are very different from white men in regard to their meals, each one breaking his fast whenever he feels the craving of his appetite. A pot, generally filled with meat and water, is placed on one side of the tepee, accompanied, if the man of the house be tolerably well off in the world, by a package of parfleche, which contains the Indian bread. If the bread is not there, the meat will do as well. A pile of ashes in the middle of the lodge tells where the meat is put to boil, and whenever an Indian is hungry he rakes together the buffalo chips, starts a blaze and puts on the pot; and when he gets too hungry to stand it any longer, he attacks the meat and eats until he is satisfied. Winged Arrow had all this to do himself, for it was too early for the women to be astir. As he sat waiting for his breakfast to be cooked, his thoughts wandered away to the school at Carlisle, and he wondered how many teachers there would have been willing to join him in his repast.
"There is not one," soliloquized the young savage. "Every one of them would turn up his nose at such a breakfast as this. And yet I am here to fight just for keeping my people in this position. Oh, why did not the whites stay in their own country?"
The smoke of the fire began to penetrate the tepee, until it was so thick as to be unbearable to any but an Indian. Winged Arrow waited until the meat was done and then, drawing his knife, proceeded to make as good a breakfast as he could out of boiled beef.
CHAPTER XV. What Winged Arrow Saw
Winged Arrow had not been at his breakfast long before he was startled by a noise and confusion in the camp outside. Any little bustle is enough to excite a feeling of alarm in an Indian, and coming as it did upon the quiet that reigned among the lodges, Winged Arrow was on his feet and out of his tepee in an instant. He turned toward the man on the highest point of the swell who had sat there with his blanket around him, and saw that he was on his feet and waving that blanket furiously aloft to attract the attention of the people in the village. He was repeating the signals that the other Indians had made to him—that there was something going on in the Fort. There could be but one explanation of his signals: The soldiers were starting a wagon train and were coming out to get wood. As he was about to turn into his tepee again, he met Reuben hurrying up.
"Do you see that?" said he.
"Yes, I see it," replied Winged Arrow. "Now remember that every soldier in that squad has some medicine with him that our bullets cannot penetrate. When you come back, you don't want to say to yourself: 'There is one fellow that I have wiped out.'"
The boys went into their tepee only to re-appear again almost immediately. A spectator would have had to look more than once before recognizing them. They were stripped from the waist up, had bonnets on their heads, and nothing in their hands but their rifles. Neither of them carried a knife, for they did not believe in mutilating bodies that fell into their hands. Each carried a belt of cartridges which was slung around his waist. While they were going to get their horses, they heard a whoop at the lower end of the village, and the next moment Red Cloud dashed by, mounted on a snow-white pony, stripped to the waist, as all his men were, and hideously painted, "making the picture the very incarnation of exultant war."