“No, no!”
“I’ll throw this serape into the bargain. You have coveted it for five years.”
“Red Eagle won’t sell the Gold Girl.”
“Not for the darker flower, my serape and sword?”
“No!”
“Then he shall keep her! The Pale Pawnee will love his captive, and he hopes that the gold flower will thrive in Red Eagle’s lodge.”
With the last word, he put forth his hand, and in the soft starlight the palms of red and white met.
It was the grip of a Cæsar and his Brutus—the silent pledge, beneath friendship’s cloak, of hatred and treason bitter and intense.
“The fate of the pale flower is settled now—settled forever, chief. One is mine, the other yours. I’ll settle the insulting agent’s doom hereafter.”
A few moments later the arbiters of others’ fates remounted their steeds and rode toward the Pawnee lodges.