"The old men, our wise ones, say," he went on, "that Cold-Maker may sometime obtain what he is ever seeking, a medicine so powerful that it will enable him to drive the sun far, far into the south and keep him there. Think how terrible it would be! Our beautiful prairies and mountains would become an always-winter land! The game, the trees and brush and grasses, would all die off, and we, of course, should perish with them!"
"Don't you worry about that!" I told him. "Sun has a certain trail to follow, and he is all-powerful. Let him make what medicine he may, old Cold-Maker cannot halt his course!"
"Ha! That is my thought, too. Wise though our old men are, they certainly don't know all about what is going on up there in the sky!"
Off to the south of us I heard my uncle mutter something about youthful philosophers and then laugh quietly.
From where we stood, with our shoulders and heads concealed by some brush stuck into the barricade, we could see the black mass of the grove and the silvery gleam of the river sweeping by it. The hush and quiet of the night were almost unbroken; not even an owl was hooting. The only sound that we could hear at all was the murmur of the river close under the cutbank on our left. The Missouri is a deceptive river. Though its heaving, eddying, swift flow is apparently without obstructions, yet it has a voice—an insistent, deep, plaintive voice that rises and falls and makes the listener imagine things; that seems to be trying to tell all the strange scenes and changes it has witnessed down through the countless ages of its being.
"Do you hear it, the voice, the singing of the river? Isn't it beautiful?" I said.
"It is terrible, heart-chilling. What you hear is not the voice of the river; it is the singing of the dread Under-Water People who live down there in its depths and ever watch for a chance to drag us down to our death!"
My uncle slipped up behind us so quietly that we were startled. "You youngsters quit talking; use your eyes instead of your mouths!" he whispered, and stole back to his stand on the south side of the enclosure.
"We were and we are using our eyes, but maybe we were talking too loud; we will whisper from now on," said Pitamakan.
"Do you think that the war party discovered our camp last evening?" I asked.