At about mid-day two of the scouts who had been among his captors came up to him and signed to him to follow them. They led him across a foot-worn patch of grass towards the entrance of the Medicine Lodge, where they came to a halt, standing on guard over him.
Rube wondered what was going to happen; but, watching, he began to understand that the chief warriors and medicine men were within the lodge, and that some sort of court of justice was being held. He further gathered from the picture-writing on the lodge that these Redskins were of the Crow nation, and that the tribal name of their chief was Falling Water.
When at length he was marched into the lodge he saw the councillors seated on the floor in a half-circle round a small fire. All of them wore feathered war bonnets and had their faces painted.
Falling Water himself, a grim, wizen-featured old man, sat in the middle, smoking a tobacco pipe that was shaped like a tomahawk and adorned with coloured beads and feathers. He looked at Rube long and steadily, and then spoke to one of the scouts inquiringly.
Rube could only understand the answer by the gestures and signs that accompanied it. From these and what followed he was able to make up a coherent outline of the offence of which he was being accused.
It appeared that a picket of scouts had been out on the mountains watching for enemy spies. They had captured this one in the very act of spying upon them. He had been making signals, sending messages and answering messages by sounds made with his lips. He carried a gun, and was ready to use it upon them if they had not been too quick for them. And he was disguised. It was clear that he was an Indian—one of their Sioux enemies—who had tried to make himself look like a Paleface. Moreover, he wore the totem sign of his chief, who was the enemy of Falling Water.
Rube was perplexed in his effort to understand this part of the scout's evidence.
He was not surprised that he had been mistaken for a full-blooded Indian. Was not his mother an Indian? And had not both he and Kiddie when they started on their camping trip dressed themselves in fringed buckskins and designedly made themselves look as much as possible like Indians?
He supposed that the scouts picketed on the heights had heard Kiddie's whistle from afar and his own feeble attempt to respond. What puzzled him most was the spokesman's declaration that he wore the totem sign of his chief. For so he understood the scout's gestures.
Falling Water was apparently dissatisfied, for he closely questioned the witness, whose answer, partly in the Crow tongue and partly in pantomime, threw a flood of light upon Rube's perplexity.