"Hear, then, Chief Sitting Wolf. Hear, Beaver Tail, my teacher. Hear, my friends. I speak from a full heart, and the fool tears tell you I'm not a man yet fit to sit among men, or to ride for buffalo out there beyond the World Spine, or to walk on the war trail, or to keep a wife.
"You go soon, most of you, to join with the Flatheads, Nez Percés, Pend d'Oreilles, Cœur d'Alènes, perhaps even a few Yakimas. Your fit men will ride together in force across the World Spine to the Great Plains, to run the buffalo bulls of the spring hunting, perhaps to fight the Blackfeet. Your women will ride to dry the meat and dress the robes.
"The rest of the tribe will go in your canoes along the Lake and the West Arm, and the river of the Kutenais to the Mother of Rivers, and downstream to the Great Falls. There they will join the fishing tribes, under the Salmon Chief. They will catch the salmon, trade at Fort Colville, feast, dance, gamble. They take the women to smoke the fish. They take the children; for the babies, even the dogs, are fit. I shall be left behind, less than the least, worse than a dog."
The chief looked sulky and aggrieved, the medicine man was clearing his throat to make a soothing speech. One of the leaders asked Storm to be his brother at the hunting. Another was muttering, "Shame! shame!" All were uncomfortable. "Come to the point!" growled Sitting Wolf.
And Storm was laughing at their disquietude. "No need," he said more cheerfully, "for the dog to freeze."
He threw some wood on the fire, then wrapped a robe about his shoulders.
"I am here," continued Storm, "to speak for him that was my father. What has the little law of your petty tribe to do with a chief among the Russians? By the law of the Russian tribe his sit-on-the-right woman, Two Bits, gets the trading house and the lodge furnishings. By the law of the Russians the four widows have taken equal shares of the pony herd and harness, the canoes and paddles, the dog teams and carrioles. He who marries one of these widows will be rich.
"Again I speak for my dead father. He was a Russian, I am an Englishman. Russia and England are the left arm and the right arm of mankind, enfolding the whole earth. And where the fingers meet, the Kutenais tribe is a flea caught under a finger nail of the English. By the law of both Russians and English I am heir to the great chief who made me his son.
"The trade room is full of furs, and these are mine."
Sitting Wolf leaned forward staring, snarling in his throat, but Storm went on, looking him straight in the eyes and laughing at him. "Enough," he said incisively, "to load the canoes of the tribe!—Silence! I speak!—and at Fort Colville, to buy guns for all your hunters. Do you object to having your hunters armed?"