a bold
trader and went into Canada at one time. He founded old Fort Whoop-up.
He got to be worth some money in his stores, though always liberal with
the Indians. He was the man who showed the engineers of the Great
Northern Railroad the pass which they built through. It is the lowest
railroad pass of them all, though the one farthest north of all our
railroads over the Rockies.

"Now, I knew Joe Kipp very well and often met him on the Blackfeet
Reservation. He lived in a big frame house there, had a bathtub and a
Chinaman cook, and showed his Indians how to 'follow the path of the
white man.'

"But what I want you to remember is this: Joe Kipp had his Mandan mother
with him until she died. I have seen her, too, a very tall, old woman,
and wild as a hawk. Joe built her a little cabin all her own, where no
one else ever went. In her little cabin she spent her last years as she
had lived in her earlier days among the Mandans, making moccasins for
Joe, decorating tobacco pouches and fire bags with beads and porcupine
quills. I have a fire bag of hers that Joe gave me, and I prize it very
much. She no longer had the buffalo, but on the rafters of her lodge she
had her dried meat hanging, and the interior was something no man living
will see again.

"Joe Kipp's Mandan mother was the last living soul of the pure-blood
Mandan tribe, one of the most curious and puzzling ones of the
West--they were a light-colored people, the children with light eyes; no
one knows how they came on the Missouri. But the smallpox got them
almost all. They went crazy, jumped in the river--died--passed.

"Well, Joe's mother, so he said, was the last, a very old woman, I
presume nearly a hundred then. Often she would take her blanket and go
out on a hilltop and sit there motionless hours at a time, with her
blanket over her face--thinking, thinking, I presume, over the days
that you and I are studying together now.

"And just a little while ago I heard of Joe Kipp's death, too. His
mother died some years earlier. So that is some Mandan history which I
presume even our Mandan friend here never has heard before--about the
last of the Mandans, who came down, broken and helpless, even into our
own time."

"Don't!" suddenly said Rob. "Please don't! It makes me sad."

They fell silent as presently each found his way to his blankets.

CHAPTER XVII

AT THE YELLOWSTONE

The motor-car journey of the party had not much of eventfulness, bei