"All right. Good hunting!"
Trouble brooded on Hector's face as he turned his horses out into the morning.
He was miles on his way before the holiday spirit came back to him and the buffalo skull went bang into its pigeon-hole.
Milk River, now! And Moon! And Sleeping Thunder!
V
The nights between the days which witnessed the Sun Dance Hector thought wonderful, for it was then that Sleeping Thunder opened his heart. Each night they sat beside the crimson fire, before the teepee, under a splendid canopy of purple strewn with stars. The silence of the plains, with only the howl of a lonely wolf by way of contrast, was about them as they sat, their voices took on mystic qualities unknown to them by day, the air was tense with hidden forces. Nothing stirred and there was nothing to divert them but the flitting form of Moon, attending the fire.
Hector spoke of one thing which dominated his mind, puzzling him.
"At this meeting, Sleeping Thunder, I have seen two ceremonies: one the making of a brave, the other the renewal of the vows of wives and maidens. To me these are as far apart as sun and earth. The first, to me—and I speak for all white men—is barbarous and cruel. But the second is very beautiful. Why do we find these things in the same race and practised by one people?"
Sleeping Thunder, answering him, revealed the entire sum and substance of his Indian philosophy:
"Because you find a thing you think terrible standing side by side with something that is beautiful, you are puzzled. But there is nothing strange in this. It is true to Nature. In one man, to say nothing of peoples, you will find great evils dwelling with much that is good. In the white race, as in the Indian, practices that are beautiful and practices that are ugly walk hand in hand. The white man's law, shielding the weak from the strong, is beautiful. The white man's gambling dens and saloons are not. The Indians, my son, are not the only people possessed at once by good and evil!"