“Some hundreds. Five hundred or so. And a tricky bunch they are. They're over-fond of cattle to be really desirable neighbors.”
“Well, I think it rather a pity!”
“Look yonder!” cried her husband, sweeping his arm toward the eastern horizon. From the height on which they stood a wonderful panorama of hill and valley, river, lake and plain lay spread out before them. “All that and for nine hundred miles beyond that line these Indians and their kin gave up to us under persuasion. There was something due them, eh? Let's move on.”
For a mile or more the trail ran along the high plateau skirting the Piegan Reserve, where it branched sharply to the right. Cameron paused.
“You see that trail?” pointing to the branch that led to the left and downward into the valley. “That is one of the oldest and most famous of all Indian trails. It strikes down through the Crow's Nest Pass and beyond the pass joins the ancient Sun Dance Trail. That's my old beat. And weird things are a-doing along that same old Sun Dance Trail this blessed minute or I miss my guess. I venture to say that this old trail has often been marked with blood from end to end in the fierce old days.”
“Let's go,” said Mandy, with a shudder, and, turning her pony to the right, she took the trail that led them down from the plateau, plunged into a valley, wound among rocks and thickets of pine till it reached a tumbling mountain torrent of gray-blue water, fed from glaciers high up between the great peaks beyond.
“My Little Horn!” cried Mandy with delight.
Down by its rushing water they scrambled till they came to a sunny glade where the little fretful torrent pitched itself headlong into a deep shady pool, whence, as if rested in those quiet deeps, it issued at first with gentle murmuring till, out of earshot of the pool, it broke again into turbulent raging, brawling its way to the Big Horn below.
Mandy could hardly wait for the unloading and tethering of the ponies.
“Now,” she cried, when all was ready, “for my very first fish. How shall I fling this hook and where?”