d their bullets
into the pony-soldiers. The Bad Gods had whispered to the Yellow-Eyes;
they had made them see under the snow. The Chis-chis-chash were dead
men, but they would take many with them to the spirit-land. The Fire
Eater felt but a few cartridges in his belt and knew that he must use
them sparingly. The little boy sat crying on the buffalo robe. Holding
his smoking rifle in one hand, he passed the other over his scalp-lock.
The bat-skin medicine was not there. For the first time since the Good
Gods had given it to him, back in his youth, did he find himself without
it. A nameless terror overcame him. He was a truly naked man in the
snow, divested of the protection of body and soul.

[Illustration: 14 He made his magazine gun blaze until empty]

He meditated long before he reached down and gathered up his offspring.
Carefully wrapping up the wailing infant, he handed it to a squaw who
stood near shivering and moaning wildly. "Stay here and hold my boy. I
am going back."

Shoving cartridges into his magazine, he made his way down, the light
snow flying before him. Rounding the rocks he could see down into the
main canon; see the pony-soldiers and their Indian allies tearing down
and burning the lodges. The yellow glare of many fires burned brightly
in contrast with the cold blue of the snow. He scanned narrowly the
place where his own lodge had been and saw it fall before many hands to
be taken to their fires. With raised shoulders and staring eyes he stood
aghast. He drunk in the desecration in all its awful significance. The
bat's skin--the hand of the Good Gods--was removed from him; his shadow
was as naked as his back.

In the snow a hundred yards below him lay his young squaw, the mother of
his boy, and she had not moved since she lay down.

As the pony-soldiers finally saw the stark figure of the Indian among
the rocks they sent a shower of bullets around him. He had no medicine;
the Bad Gods would direct the bullets to his breast. He turned and ran
frantically away.

The last green-grass had seen the beplumed chief with reddened battle-ax
leading a hundred swift warriors over the dying pony-soldiers, but now
the cold, blue snow looked on a naked man running before bullets, with
his medicine somewhere in the black smoke which began to hang like a
pall over the happy winter camp of the bravest Indians. The ebb and flow
of time had fattened and thinned the circumstances of the Fire Eater's
life many t