"No; from the Reservation, I suppose. He doesn't look like a blanket brave. We will see."
Coming within speaking distance, she hailed him across the divide of the little stream, and got in reply what seemed to Stuart an inextricable mass of staccatos and gutturals.
"He is a Kootenai," she explained, "and wants to impress on our minds that is a good Indian."
"He does not look good for much," was the natural remark of the white man, eyeing Mr. Kootenai critically; "even on his native heath he is not picturesque."
"No—poor imp!" agreed the girl, "with winter so close, their concern is more how they are to live than how they appear to people who have no care for them."
She learned he was on his way south to the Flathead Reservation; so he had evidently solved the question of how he intended living for the winter, at all events. He was, however, short of ammunition. When Rachel explained his want, Stuart at once agreed to give him some.
"Don't be in a hurry!" advised his commander-in-chief; "wait until we know how it is that he has no ammunition, and so short a distance from his tribe. An Indian can always get that much if he is not too lazy to hunt or trap, or is not too much of a thief."
But she found the noble red man too proud to answer many questions of a squaw. The fear however, of hostilities from the ever-combative Blackfeet seemed to be the chief moving cause.
"Rather a weak-backed reason," commented Rachel; "and I guess you can dig roots from here to the Reservation. No powder, no shot."
"Squaw—papoose—sick," he added, as a last appeal to sympathy.