EAGLE EYE REMEMBERS
When Eagle Eye left the Peniman family, striding away across the plains without a word of gratitude or farewell, Mrs. Peniman and the girls felt grieved and disappointed.
It would have comforted them perhaps if they could have seen his face; if they could have detected the surreptitious glances he threw backward, or if they could have beheld the moisture that blurred his eyes, which he hurriedly wiped away as if ashamed of his weakness.
He was not yet strong, and could not make rapid progress, and as he sat down in the grass now and then to rest his eyes turned ever backward to the homestead, while he turned over and over in his mind the story Joshua Peniman had told him.
Of that story he knew more than the white man suspected.
He was a Sioux, and had seen Red Snake among his people.
When, after many days' travel, he at last reached the Sioux village on the Missouri River, near the mouth of the Niobrara, he went at once to the head chief of the tribe.
"Where Red Snake?" he asked in his own language.
"I know not," answered the chief in the same language, "I have not seen him for many sleeps."
"Red Snake bad man," continued Eagle Eye, and proceeded to tell the chief the story that Joshua Peniman had told him, adding to it much that he had learned about the family while being nursed back to health among them.