Drifting Crane turned his head and gazed out on the western sky, still red with the light of the fallen sun. His face was rigid as bronze, but there was a dreaming, prophetic look in his eyes. A lump came into the settler's throat; for the first time in his life he got a glimpse of the infinite despair of the Indian. He forgot that Drifting Crane was the representative of a "vagabond race;" he saw in him, or rather _felt_ in him, something almost magnetic. He was a _man_, and a man of sorrows. The settler's voice was husky when he spoke again, and his lips trembled. "Chief, I'd go to-morrow if it 'ud do any good, but it won't--not a particle. You know that, when you stop to think a minute. What good did it do to massa_cree_ all them settlers at New Ulm? What good will it do to murder me and a hundred others? Not a bit. A thousand others would take our places. So I might just as well stay, and we might just as well keep good friends. Killin' is out o' fashion; don't do any good." There was a twitching about the stern mouth of the Indian chief. He understood all too well the irresistible logic of the pioneer. He kept his martial attitude, but his broad chest heaved painfully, and his eyes grew dim. At last he said: "Good-by. Cattleman right; Drifting Crane wrong. Shake hands. Good-by." He turned and strode away. The rancher watched him till he mounted his pony, picketed down by the river; watched him as, with drooping head and rein flung loose upon the neck of his horse, he rode away into the dusk, hungry, weary and despairing, to face his problem alone. Again, for the thousandth time, the impotence of the Indian's arm and the hopelessness of his fate were shown as perfectly as if two armies had met and soaked the beautiful prairie sod with blood. "This is all wrong," muttered the settler. "There's land enough for us all, or ought to be. I don't understand----Well, I'll leave it to Uncle Sam anyway." He ended with a sigh. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- PART VIII. OLD DADDY DEERING: THE COUNTRY FIDDLER. Like Scotland's harper, Or Irish piper, with his droning lays, Before the spread of modern life and light The country fiddler slowly disappears. DADDY DEERING. I. They were threshing on Farmer Jennings' place when Daddy made his very characteristic appearance. Milton, a boy of thirteen, was gloomily holding sacks for the measurer, and the glory of the October day was dimmed by the suffocating dust, and poisoned by the smarting beards and chaff which had worked their way down his neck. The bitterness of the dreaded task was deepened also by contrast with the gambols of his cousin Billy, who was hunting rats with Growler amid the last sheaves of the stack bottom. The piercing shrieks of Billy, as he clapped his hands in murderous glee, mingled now and again with the barking of the dog.