The dusk was falling, and big white stars broke through as the sky darkened. "I reckon," said Constable Buckie wearily, "we've time for a swim before supper."
So I challenged him to race me at undressing, and dived into the lake, which was nice and warm for swimming. When Buckie had shed his uniform, he joined me, and very soon our troubles were forgotten. At nineteen, it is rather hard to be officially minded after business hours. As for me, I liked Buckie first-rate, because he happened to be a clean-bred Canadian. I did not know that we should be chums for life.
Rain was ever a busy little person, and now in the twilight she made haste to get everything ready. She cut loose Tail-Feathers, who passed away into the gloaming, no longer in anyway attached to the mounted police. She used his lashings to make a neat bundle of Buckie's arms and uniform, which she dropped without a sound into deep water. Then leaving the supper to cook itself, she adjourned to an ant-heap a little way from the camp, where all alone in the gloom she howled for her poor father.
There was a tang of frost in the air when we came out chilled, famished and distressed by Rain's most dismal lamentations. The fire was dead, there was nothing to eat, and Tail-Feathers had escaped, so it seemed, with Buckie's kit. As to Rain, she said we were very rude to interrupt her grief. She was an orphan, and a prisoner.
Wrapped in my painted robe, with chattering teeth, Buckie sat by our fire, projecting schemes for tracking Tail-Feathers by torchlight and by moonshine. It was awkward, though, that the Indian had decamped with both the police carbines, both their revolvers, all the ammunition. Even when comforted with much beef, the pony soldier trembled at the thought of his doom when he made official report to the sergeant-in-charge at Slide-out. Later, in the darkness of the teepee, I heard him weeping, and at dawn he set out barefoot on some futile attempt to track Tail-Feathers. The ground was then white with frost.
On his departure, Rain sat up, a little heap of mischief, and whispered across the teepee, "If I were only free!"
And I yawned back, "What then?"
"I think," she said demurely, "I could find the soldier's clothes."
"Cat!"
She purred. "And make you back into a white man, Charging Buffalo."