"Etzeeah, you are a fool," said Jack, loud enough for all to hear. "Ascota feeds you lies, and you swallow them without chewing. Do you think you can fight all the white men with your eighteen lodges? To the south there are more white men than cranes in the flocks that fly overhead in the spring. When your few shells are spent, where will you get more bullets to shoot the white men?"
"Ascota will give us plenty shells!" cried a voice in the crowd.
"Why isn't Ascota here now to help you?" asked Jack quickly. "He said he would be here to show you how to fool me? Why? Because I tied him like a dog in his tent, with a boy to watch him."
They looked at each other and murmured.
"If you did drive the white men away," Jack went on, "how would you kill the moose for food without their powder? Who would buy your furs? Where would you get flour and tea and tobacco, and matches to light your fires? Wah! You are like children who throw their food down and tread on it, and cry for it again!"
What effect this had, if any, could not be read in the dark, walled faces that fronted him.
Mary returned to Jack, bringing a gun, which she handed him without comment. He recognized it. It was a weapon that had lately been aimed at him.
"This is the sick man's gun," he said, looking hard at Etzeeah.
The chief threw up his hands. "A Winchester thirty-thirty, like all our guns," he protested. "There are twenty here the same."
Other men held up their weapons to show. Jack merely turned the gun around, and pointed to initials neatly scratched on the stock.