At last they came in sight of the place where the several big scenes of the moving picture were going to be photographed. A river that the little Bunkers had not before seen flowed here in a great curve which Cowboy Jack spoke of as the Oxbow Bend. It was a grassy, gently sloping field, with not a tree in sight save along the edge of the water.
Nevertheless, many trees had been brought here and a good-sized stockade, or "fort," had been erected. The structure was in imitation of those forts, or posts, of the United States Army that marked the advance of the pioneers into this vast Western country a good deal more than half a century ago.
Daddy Bunker had told the children something about the development of this part of the United States the evening before, and Russ and Rose, at least, had understood and remembered. But just now they were all more interested in the people they found here at the Oxbow Bend and in what they were doing.
In one place were several covered wagons and the traveling kitchen. Here the white members of the moving picture company lived. At the other side was the encampment of Black Bear and his people. The Indian camp had been brought to this place from the spot where the little Bunkers had first visited it.
Black Bear and Little Elk and the other Indians welcomed the little Bunkers very kindly. And on this occasion the Eastern children became acquainted with the little Indians who had come down from the Indian reservation in Oklahoma with their parents to work for the moving picture company.
Rose and Russ felt they knew these Indian boys and girls already. You see, they had seen more of the Indians than the other Bunker children had. They found that Indian boys and girls played a good deal like white children. At least, the dark-faced little girls had dolls made of corncobs and wood, with painted faces, and they wrapped them in tiny blankets. One little girl showed Rose her "best" doll which she had carefully hidden away in a tent. This doll was a rosy-cheeked beauty that could open and shut her eyes, and must have cost a good deal of money. She told Rose that Chief Black Bear had given the doll to her for learning Sunday-school texts.
The boys took Russ and Laddie down to the edge of the river and sailed several toy canoes that the men of the tribe had fashioned for them. The canoes were just like big Indian canoes, with high prows and sterns and painted with targets. Besides these toys the Indian boys had bows and arrows that were modeled much better than the bows and arrows Russ and Laddie owned, and could shoot much farther.
When Russ tried the Indians' bow and arrows he was surprised at the distance he could drive the arrow and how accurately he sent it.
"I guess you boys know how to make 'em right," he told Joshua Little Elk, one of the Indian lads and a son of the big Little Elk who had helped find Rose when she was lost. "Laddie and I have only got boughten bow-arrows, and the arrows don't fly very good."
"My papa made this bow for me," said Joshua, who was a very polite little boy with jet-black hair. "And he scraped the arrows and found the heads."