CHAPTER XXIII
LONE CHIEF GOES WEST
Many moons had come and gone since Dusty Star and Kiopo disappeared into the West. To those who asked questions, none made answer. That was partly because the folk who knew were not asked. The folk who knew, not being asked, kept that knowledge to themselves. Baltook could have told; Boola also. Goshmeelee herself was a storehouse of information. But none of these were likely to travel hundreds of miles east to carry news to those who did not come to them. Even Lone Chief himself, popularly supposed to know all things, if only he could be persuaded to tell them, did not know.
One evening, in late summer, an Indian came riding into camp. He had ridden fast and far, and his pony was exhausted. He brought disquieting news. The Yellow Dogs, their deadly enemies, were gathering in the North. The Sarcees, allies of the Yellow Dogs, were also on the war-path. Trouble would come from the north, even before the wild geese.
Hastily the old Chief, Spotted Eagle, summoned a gathering of the braves. But first he sent an urgent message to Lone Chief. And Lone Chief, already knowing of the threatening danger, came. So when Spotted Eagle made a solemn speech of few words but very packed with information, Lone Chief was not surprised. How did he know?... In the vast solitudes of the North West, long before Telegraph wires were invented, news travelled in peculiarly wireless ways along the fine waves of the air for those whose minds were the right sort of receivers. And Lone Chief had that sort of mind which was always receiving. But though he came, he sat in silence at the meeting, and let other people talk. And not till every one else had spoken, some suggesting one thing, and some another, did Lone Chief open the outside of his mouth and astonish his hearers with the inside of his mind.
"You will never be able to defeat the Yellow Dogs without the strong medicine," he said. "The strong medicine departed from you, when you drove Dusty Star's wolf into the west. Dusty Star and his wolf are a powerful medicine. You have none left to you which is as strong as theirs. Unless they bring it back to you, you will lose your scalps to the Yellow Dogs."
After Lone Chief had ceased speaking, great astonishment filled his audience; yet because it was Lone Chief who had said the marvellous thing, they were forced to believe it, even against their will.
But when Spotted Eagle and the rest of the company had discussed the matter very gravely, and had solemnly asked him on behalf of the whole tribe, to find Dusty Star, and beg him to come back, Lone Chief shook his head, and swept his hand towards the West.
"Out there," he said, "is the land of the buffalo; and beyond the land of the buffalo, is the land of the timber-wolves, and the country of the Cariboo. Dusty Star might have stayed with the buffalo; but the wolf would seek his own kindred; and the wolf-kindred make long journeys on the trails of the Cariboo. How do I know that they have not taken a trail—Dusty Star and the Wolf? And the journeying Cariboo have a thousand trails to the great Lake of the sunset where all trails have an end."