With the awful desperation of a last hope the Indians leaped high into the Night surrounding them to grasp at a star—a star, alas! which proved to be but a will-o'-the-wisp set over a quagmire of death. Nothing seemed impossible to their excited fancy. Had not the white race killed the Christ upon a Cross of torture, and would he not come to earth again as an Indian, to gather his children together in everlasting happiness when the grass should be green with the Spring? Meantime they must dance, dance through the weary days and nights in order that the prophesy might be fulfilled.
An alarm spread through the country. What meant this frenzied dance of circling, whirling mystics who strained with wide eyes to look beyond the skies? An order came that the dance must cease. This decree was but human, the one which bade them dance they believed to be divine. And dance they did, wildly, madly, to the sharp time of musketry until the hurrying feet were stilled and the dancers lay cold and stark on the field of Wounded Knee.
In all the annals of the Indians' tragic tale there is nothing more pitiful than this Dance of Death. The poor victims, together with the last hope of a despairing race, were buried at Wounded Knee, and the white man wrought his will.
Slowly and steadily the woods were laid low, inevitably the Indians retreated farther and farther back, closer pressed, routed as the buffalo had been. All hope of the return of the beloved herds left their hearts and they knew at last that they would find them only in those Elysian fields of perpetual summertime—the Happy Hunting Ground.
V
The sun set red behind the mountains. The shadows stole down, gray and mystical as ghosts. From afar the coyote's dolorous cry plained through the silence and the owl hooted dismally as he awakened at the approach of night. There in the pallid dusk lay the bleached skull and the arrowhead of black obsidian, mute reliques of the past. The royal buffalo is no more, the hunter that hurled the bolt is gone. We may find the inferior offspring of the one in city parks, of the other on ever-lessening reservations, but degeneracy is more pitiful than death, and the old, free herds that ranged the continent are past as the fleet-footed, strong-hearted tribes have vanished from the plains.
So the story of the two fallen races is told eloquently by this whitened skull on the hillside and the jet-black arrow head flung by the stilled red hand.