So now he walked a fool among his people, singing the songs that ache.
Wahoo! bitter it is to be a fool! And yet, O White Brother, only they who have been fools are wise at last!
And it happened one summer that the village was builded in the flat lands by the Big Smoky Water. And there came snoring up the stream a monda geeung, the magic fire-boat of the palefaces. Up to the shore it swam, and they who guided it tied it to the sand, for its fires were hungry and there was much wood in our lands.
And all the villagers gathered there to see the magic swimmer of the palefaces; and among them came the lonesome singing fool.
And it happened that a woman of the palefaces came forth and stood high up, and looked upon us, smiling. White as a snowfall in the late spring was her face, and her hair was like the sun upon a cloud. And we all stared wide-mouthed upon her, for never before had her kind come into the prairies.
Also stared the fool. Even long after all the people had gone he stared; even until the smoky breath of the fire-boat writhed like a big black serpent out of the place where the stream runs out of the sky.
And then he laid his head upon his knees and wept; for a longing, bigger than the wish to live, or the fear to die, had come upon him.
Very early in the morning, when the sleep of all things is deepest, he arose from sleepless blankets. He called his pony from the grazing places, and he mounted for a long ride. Into the North he rode, and as he rode he talked to himself and to the silence that clung about him: “It was the Woman of the Moon! Into the North she went, even unto the quiet place where the lonesome star hangs patient. There shall I ride—there shall I ride! For there do all my songs take wings and fly; and there at last their meanings await me. There shall I ride—there shall I ride!”
And the fires of the day burned out the stars and died; downward and inward rushed the black, black ashes of the night. And still he rode toward the North.
And like the flashing of a midnight torch through a hole in a tepee flashed the days and passed. And still he rode.