mes, I can soon dispatch
him and then I will follow you. If I do not do that, they will overtake
us in our flight.'

"Wadutah (Scarlet) protested and begged to be allowed to stay with her
husband, but at last she came away to get reinforcements.

"Then Marpeetopah (Four-skies) put more sticks on the fire so that the
teepee might be brightly lit and show him the way. He then took the
scalp of the enemy and proceeded on his track, until he came to the
upturned root of a great tree. There he spread out his arrows and laid
out his tomahawk.

"Soon two more scouts were sent by the Ojibway war-party to see what was
the trouble and why the first one failed to come back. He heard them as
they approached. They were on snowshoes. When they came close to him, he
shot an arrow into the foremost. As for the other, in his effort to
turn quickly his snow-shoes stuck in the deep snow and detained him, so
Marpeetopah killed them both.

"Quickly he took the scalps and followed Wadutah. He ran hard. But the
Ojibways suspected something wrong and came to the lonely teepee,
to find all their scouts had been killed. They followed the path of
Marpeetopah and Wadutah to the main village, and there a great battle
was fought on the ice. Many were killed on both sides. It was after this
that the Sioux moved to the Mississippi river."

I was sleepy by this time and I rolled myself up in my buffalo robe and
fell asleep.

II. Adventures of My Uncle

IT was a beautiful fall day--'a gopher's last look back,' as we used to
say of the last warm days of the late autumn. We were encamped beside
a wild rice lake, where two months before we had harvested our watery
fields of grain, and where we had now returned for the duck-hunting.
All was well with us. Ducks were killed in countless numbers, and in the
evenings the men hunted deer in canoes by torchlight along the shores of
the lake. But alas! life is made up of good times and bad times, and it
is when we are perfectly happy that we should expect some overwhelming
misfortune.

"So it was that upon this peaceful and still morning, all of a sudden a
harsh and terrible war-cry was heard! Your father was then quite a young
man, and a very ambitious warrior, so that I was always frightened on
his account whenever there was a chance of fighting. But I did not think
of your uncle, Mysterious Medicine, for he was not over fifteen at the
time; besides, he had never shown any taste for the field.