Both Gray Wolf and the Osages will exult later, noisily, vociferously. There will be feasting and dancing. Now they must be grave and guarded, both for their own credit and to save their Ponca adversaries from a wound. Bill turns and rides slowly back to the judges. The Spirit, daughter of Redemption, stands with fire eyes and tiger lily nostrils. Bill swings from the saddle. Gray Wolf throws off the blanket from the Saucy Paoli, where she waits, head bowed and silent. Her dress is the climax of Osage magnificence; the Saucy Paoli glows like a ruby against the dusk green of the prairie. Bill takes the Saucy Paoli’s hand and raises her to her feet. She lifts her head. Her glance is shy, yet warm and glad. She hesitates. Then, as one who takes courage--just as might a white girl, though with less of art--she puts up her lips to be kissed. “Now that is what I call a fair story,” commented the Red Nosed Gentleman approvingly when the Jolly Doctor came to a pause; “only I don’t like that notion of a white man marrying an Indian. It’s apt to keep alive in the children the worst characteristics of both races and none of the virtues of either.” “Now I don’t know that,” observed the Sour Gentleman, contentiously. “In my own state of Virginia many of our best people are proud to trace their blood to Pocahontas, who was sold for a copper kettle. I, myself, am supposed to have a spoonful of the blood of that daughter of Powhatan in my veins; and while it is unpleasant to recall one’s ancestress as having gone from hand to hand as the subject of barter and sale--and for no mighty price at that--I cannot say I would wish it otherwise. My Indian blood fits me very well. Did you say”--turning to the Jolly Doctor--“did you say, sir, you knew this young man who won the Saucy Paoli?” “No,” returned the Jolly Doctor, “I am guiltless of acquaintance with him. The story came to me from one of our Indian agents.” While this talk went forward, Sioux Sam, who understood English perfectly and talked it very well, albeit with a guttural Indian effect, and who had listened to the Jolly Doctor’s story with every mark of interest, was saying something in a whisper to the Old Cattleman. “He tells me,” remarked the Old Cattleman in reply to my look of curiosity, “that if you-alls don’t mind, he’ll onfold on you a Injun tale himse’f. It’s one of these yere folk-lore stories, I suppose, as Doc Peets used to call ’em.” The whole company made haste to assure Sioux Sam that his proposal was deeply the popular one; thus cheered, our dark-skinned raconteur, first lighting his pipe with a coal from the great fireplace, issued forth upon his verbal journey. “An’ this,” said Sioux Sam, lifting a dark finger to invoke attention and puffing a cloud the while, “an’ this tale, which shows how Forked Tongue, the bad medicine man, was burned, must teach how never to let the heart fill up with hate like a pond with the rains, nor permit the tongue to go a crooked trail.”