By the time our cook reached us, out of breath and perspiring terribly, two savages had ridden out from their band, weaponless, and were now gesturing a wish to communicate. The Professor and our guide rode to meet them, apparently unarmed; but with characteristic exhibition of the white man's subtlety, the tail-pocket of the philosopher's coat held a pistol in reserve, and the guide, I have no doubt, was equally well provided. CHAPTER XI. WHITE WOLF, THE CHEYENNE CHIEF--HUNGRY INDIANS--RETURN TO HAYS--A CHEYENNE WAR PARTY--THE PIPE OF PEACE--THE COUNCIL CHAMBER--WHITE WOLF'S SPEECH, AS RENDERED BY SACHEM--THE WHITE MAN'S WIGWAM. About midway between our party and the dusky group that stood watching us the four embassadors met. The Indians proved to be a band of Cheyennes, under White Wolf, or, as he is more frequently called, Medicine Wolf, out on the war-path against the Pawnees. The Wolf was a fine-looking man, six feet four in height, straight as an arrow, and developed like a giant. Being a chief, he possessed the regalia and warranty deed of one, consisting of a ragged military coat without any tail, and a dirty letter from some Indian agent, with a lie in it over which even a Cheyenne must have smiled, telling how White Wolf loved the whites. Perhaps he did; his namesake loves spring lamb. Our guide was an indifferent interpreter, but had no difficulty in understanding that the Indians were hungry and wished something to eat. In all my experience from that day to this I have never found an Indian who was not hungry, except once. The exception was an old fellow who, although enough of an Indian to be habitually drunk, was so degenerate a specimen in other respects as to be somewhat dyspeptic. His stomach had repudiated, after receiving a deposit from a trader of one hundred pickled oysters, and had temporarily closed its doors. His stock of gastric juices seemed to have been well-nigh bankrupted by a fifty years' discounting of jerked buffalo. The one hundred tons of this compound which the noble warrior had dissolved would have exhausted the liquid of a tannery. Let these savages of the plains meet a white man, whenever or wherever they may, their first demand is always for meat and drink, followed not unfrequently by another for his scalp. The victim may have but a day's rations, and be a hundred miles from any station where more can be obtained, but his all is taken as greedily and remorselessly as if he commanded a commissary train.