“How can I get revenge upon my people?” he asked himself. And as yet he could not answer. The pale dawn found him sitting upon the hills. Then he arose and mounted his pony and the three went southward—the pony, the man, and the question. A light wind blew upon his back. “How can I get revenge upon my people?” he sang aloud in endless variation until his question wove itself into a song—a battle song, for Little Weasel had not eaten, and hunger feeds anger. But the light wind sighing at his back made no answer. “I will go to the country of the Pawnees and make them angry with my people,” he said to himself, and this seemed the answer to his question until the sun had reached its highest in the sky and the wind had fallen and the yellow prairie had become parched and bare. In the afternoon he stopped in the glare of the sun and held one wet finger above his head that he might learn the source of the wind. There was a faint breath from the south. As he stood it increased, coming in little puffs, hot and fitful and dry. Suddenly it came with a great puff and boomed in the arid gulches. Little Weasel shouted with joy. He had heard his answer in the booming of the sudden wind. He dismounted, and, with a flint and some dry grass, lit a little fire. The great wind fed it and it grew. Then Little Weasel collected a bunch of grass, lit it and rapidly set fire to the dry prairie. Long, yellow flames leaped up from the sun-cured buffalo-grass, howled in the wind that grew stronger and stronger, and raced northward toward the valley where the circled lodges of the Omahas lay. “Now I will go back,” said Little Weasel, “and the fire shall go with me.” He kicked his pony in the ribs and pointed its head northward. The wave of flame preceded him, skimming the surface of the grass with great leaps, gaining strength and fleetness as the dry wind lashed it from behind. “_Aha-ha-he-ha-ha-ha-ha!_” sang Little Weasel, and the pony, straining its wiry limbs to keep pace with the yellow giant that ran before, wheezed and coughed an accompaniment to the song, for the ashes were in his nostrils. Over hills, through valleys, across gulches the pony ran, with the wall of flame ever a strong man’s bow-shot ahead of him. Now the Omahas, who had been deprived of their feast of victory the evening before, had made the feast fires roar upward throughout the village that day and much meat had been eaten. Weary with much dancing and singing and heavy with meat, the evening twilight found them sleeping heavily. And the night deepened and still they slept. But there was one upon whom the feast had laid but a light hand, and who awoke suddenly in the night with a smell in his nostrils, a roaring in his ears, and a great light in his eyes. He marvelled, for the feast fires were dead in their ashes. He arose, and when he reached the door of his lodge he gave a cry that woke the sleeping village and brought the people clamouring into the open air.