"Crazy," said Rawhide Robinson.
"As a loon," added Parker, the night herder.
"Give him a pull at the Parson's bottle in the medicine chest," suggested the Kid, as he gave the fire a stir under a pot of bean soup.
"No," said the Parson, as he rode up on a mule and was told the story—"no liquor, boys. Feed him up and well let him trail back with us to Cheyenne and to the asylum. Poor cuss, he loved the squaw and he's clean daffy, but hasn't a bit of Injun left in him."
And so the Lost Indian, with a broken heart, brain tortured, went back to the asylum—a child of the plains who bought his wife, but loved her for all that. For the Sioux, while selling their daughters, never sold them unless there was real evidence of true love.
And while Big Jaw stole to make good his bargain, wasn't his deed an act of old-time knighthood after all?
Moreover, his undoing was not so much because of his own delinquency as it was that of the white man's invention—whisky—that brought about his downfall.
A thief, yes; a red-skinned, uncivilized wild man of the plains and the mountains. But can we classify him with the civilized white man who commits a crime?
If the Lost Indian did not recover and win his bride in civilization's regulation way, perhaps it is just as well; and let us hope he is an angel in the Happy Hunting Ground.