lains and the mountains
would all belong to the red men again.

The chiefs knew that the hour just before dawn is when an enemy's heart
is like water, when his eyes are heavy, so they did not order the
advance at once. But a band of the young men who always fought together,
one of the inner secret societies or clans of the tribe, could not wait
so long. First come, first served. Daylight would be time to look over
the children and to keep those not desired for killing, and to select
and distribute the young women of the white nation. But the night would
be best for taking the elk-dogs and the spotted buffalo.

Accordingly a band from this clan swam and forded the wide river,
crossed the island, and in the early evening came downstream back of a
shielding fringe of cottonwoods. Their scouts saw with amazement the
village of tepees that moved on wheels. They heard the bugle, saw the
white nation gather at the medicine fire, heard them chant their great
medicine song; then saw them disperse; saw the fires fall low.

They laughed. The white nation was strong, but they did not put out
guards at night! For a week the Sioux had watched them, and they knew
about that. It would be easy to run off all the herd and to kill a few
whites even now, beginning the sport before the big battle of to-morrow,
which was to wipe out the white nation altogether.

But when at length, as the handle of the Great Dipper reached the point
agreed, the line of the Sioux clansmen crawled away from the fringe of
trees and out into the cover of a little slough that made toward the
village of tepees on wheels, a quarter of a mile in front of the village
men arose out of the ground and shot into them. Five of their warriors
fell. Tall men in the dark came out and counted coup on them, took off
their war bonnets; took off even more below the bonnets. And there was a
warrior who rode this way and that, on a great black horse, and who had
a strange war cry not heard before, and who seemed to have no fear. So
said the clan leader when he told the story of the repulse.

Taken aback, the attacking party found cover. But the Sioux would charge
three times. So they scattered and crawled in again over a half circle.
They found the wall of tepees solid; found that the white nation knew
more of war than they had thought. They sped arrow after arrow, ball
after ball, against the circle of the white tepees, but they did not
break, and inside no one moved or cried