Prairie Pawn

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In great good-humor was High Wolf and with reason. No fewer than twenty of his young men were on the warpath under the leadership of the young chiefs, Rising Hawk and Standing Bull, but still the man power of his camp was so great that he had been able to send out young and old to a great hunt, and a vastly successful one, so that now the whole camp was red with hanging buffalo meat and white with the great strips of back fat. It was not strange that the old warrior chose to wrap himself in his robe and walk slowly through the camp. Everywhere the women were at work, for now that the meat had been hung to dry, there was the labor of fleshing the many hides—cowhides for robes and lodge skins, bull hides for parfleche, shields, and everything that needed stiff and powerful leather. Three days like this, in a year’s hunting, would keep the entire camp in affluence.

So, therefore, smiles and flashing teeth turned toward the chief as he went on his solitary way through the crowd, apparently oblivious of everything, but with his old eyes missing not the least of details, until he had completed the round of the teepees and returned to the center of the camp where, near his own big lodge there stood a still more brilliant teepee, a nineteen-skin beauty, of snowy hide, with just enough gaudy paint to show off its white texture.

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