So the drums sang and the women came forth and circled about them, peering beneath hands raised browward, into the deepening shadows of the valley down which the band would sweep.
They swelled the song of victory, the song of welcome to the victors, and the look of welcome was already upon their faces as they searched the deepening shadows.
There came a rumble over the hills as of a hidden storm in time of drouth, thundering mockingly in the rainless air. The drummers lifted their sticks with trembling hands and listened—with one accord they all listened for the shouts and the hoof beats.
Now the faint treble of distant shouting pierced the growing rumble of the thunder. It was the braves! They were returning with much glory and many ponies. The drumsticks fell snarlingly upon the taut buckskin, but the sound seemed only a whisper, for the entire village was shouting with a tumult that made the grazing ponies snort upon the hillsides and gallop away with ears pricked wonderingly.
“They come! They come!”
The villagers thronged upon that side of the village that looked toward the hills from whence the thunder deepened. A dust cloud gathered behind the hills. It grew until it caught the horizontal sunlight and seemed a scintillating tower of victory. Suddenly the hill above the valley was thronged with mounted braves, waving their weapons above their heads and shouting, and a sunlit cloud of glory seemed about them.
The band swept down the hillside and down the valley, and the dust cloud thickened under the impetuous hoofs that beat the parched and yellow prairie. When they drew near the opening in the circle of lodges, the foremost hurled his panting pony back upon its haunches and the others reared and halted behind, champing at the restraining thongs.
“A-ho!” shouted the foremost, holding his weapons above his head. “We come from the Sioux! We have many ponies and also scalp-locks! Sing! For we have fought a good fight and we are not ashamed!”
A great shout went up from the village, and the drums snarled. Slowly, majestically, the circle of women began moving about the drums, keeping time to the rhythmic beats with a sideward shuffling of their feet in the dust. In a monotonous minor key the singing of the women began—at first like the crooning of an Indian mother to a restless child when the camp fires burn blue, and all the braves are snoring in the dark.
Then it rose into the mournful wail of a wife looking upon a dead face—a wordless, eloquent song. Then, with a burst, it rose into a treble cry, and words became dimly recognisable amid the ecstasy.