"Yes," she chuckled, "um—Boy-drunk-in-the-morning!"
"Nay. Charging Buffalo!"
"How many horses you bring to buy Rain?"
Squinting delightfully in his efforts at Indian gravity came Rain's big brother, Many Horses, ambling beside me to reach out a bashful hand.
"Brother," he said, in Blackfoot, "I knew you must come back."
Now my Indian blood-brother had no ideas of his own, but his mind was like a lending library to take and issue the ideas of others. And what Rain thought, he said. So she had known for all these years I would come back to her.
It went without any saying that I came back to marry Rain. All her people knew as much, for when they had given me their gracious welcome, they went on, as they must, to draw their rations, telling Many Horses to hurry up and join them. Not that a hint could penetrate his hide. But, then, there was no need for Rain and myself to be alone, for she and I were one, and nobody else existed as we rode side by side through a haze of glory. Out of that, we came to a little cluster of teepees by the lake-side.
Rain's only son, young Two Bears, had gone away to the Sand Hills, but her brother had a bunch of brown babies—three of them in his lodge—who were trying with grubby hands to mend her heart. Rain was a very great lady among the Blackfeet, daughter of Brings-down-the-Sun, widow of Tail-Feathers, and a sacred woman, but in her brother's lodge only a nurse, the down-trodden victim of that triumphant sits-beside-him wife, Owl-Calling-"Coming," mother of real brown babies. Children were scarce as angels in the Blackfoot camps, and Owl had full right to make merry.
All in a bustle, she prepared a feast for me. There was pathetic borrowing from the neighbors to make that slender supper, at which we all pretended to have no appetite. Only when it was over could I unload my horses, and for once in my life play at being millionaire. I had never dreamed I was so fabulously rich, but there were presents for everybody hidden away in my cargo, besides provisions enough for a great banquet, which kept the tribe feasting till sunrise.
The gods of the Blackfeet had deserted them. Within a generation their forty thousand mounted warriors had become a remnant of five hundred paupers, sick with tuberculosis, brutalized with liquor. They had lost their faith, their self-respect, their native cleanliness, their arts, games, festivals, and now, in sullen apathy, awaited death.