white man how he can have his ponies back]

The boy warrior stood with arms dropped at his sides, very straight in
the middle of the tent, the light from the smoke hole illuminating the
top of his body, while his eye searched the traders.

McIntish gazed through his bushy eyebrows at the victor. His burnt
skin turned an ashen-green; his right hand worked nervously along his
gun-barrel. Thus he sat for a long time, the boy standing quietly, and
no one moved in the lodge.

With many arrested motions, McIntish raised the rifle until it rested on
its butt; then he threw it from himself, and it fell with a crash
across the dead ashes of the fire, in front of the Bat. Stripping his
powder-horn and pouch off his body, violently he flung them after, and
the Bat quickly rescued them from among the ashes. Gathering the tokens
and girding them about his body, the Bat continued: "If the white liar
will march up this river one day and stop on the big meadows by the log
house, which has no fire in it; if he will keep his men quietly by the
log house, where they can be seen at all times; if he will stay there
one day, he will see his ponies coming to him. I am not a boy; I am
not a man with two tongues; I am a warrior. Go, now--before the
camp-soldiers beat you with sticks."

IV. The New Lodge

The Yellow-Eyes had departed, and at the end of four days the Bat and
Red Arrow drove a band of thirty ponies and mules upon the herd-grounds,
where they proceeded to cut them into two bunches--fifteen horses for
each young man. This was not a bad beginning in life, where ponies and
robes were the things reckoned. The Bat got down from his horse and
tossed a little brother onto it, telling him to look after them. The
copper-colored midget swelled perceptibly as he loped away after the
Bat's nineteen horses, for the twentieth, which was the war-pony, was
taken to be picketed by Big Hair's Lodge.

As the Bat stalked among the Chis-chis-chash, he was greeted often--all
eyes turned to him. No mere boys dared longer to be familiar; they only
stood modestly, and paid the tribute to greatness which much staring
denotes. The white man's new rifle lay across his left arm, his painted
robe dragged on the ground, his eagle-feather waved perpendicularly
above the dried Bat's skin, the sacred red paint of war bloodied
his whole face, and a rope and a whip--symbols of his success with
horses--dangled in his right hand, while behind him followed