During the day the young men, except the dancers, piled up dry logs in a level open space near, for a grand demonstration. At night, when it was fired, I folded my blanket over my shoulders, comme les sauvages, and went out. The faces of many girls were brilliant with vermilion; others were blacked, their robes, leggings, and skin dresses glittering with beads and quill-work. Rings and bracelets of shining brass encircled their taper arms and fingers, and shells dangled from their ears. Indeed, all the finery collectable was piled on in barbarous profusion, though a few, in good taste through poverty, wore a single band and but few rings, with jetty hair parted in the middle, from the forehead to the neck, terminating in two handsome braids. The young men who can afford the expense trade for dollars and silver coin of less denomination--coin as a currency is not known among them--which they flatten thin, and fasten to a braid of buffalo hair, attached to the crown lock, which hangs behind, outside of the robe, and adds much to the handsome appearance of the wearer. The girls, numbering two hundred, fell into line together, and the men, of whom there were two hundred and fifty, joining, a circle was formed, which travelled around with the same shuffling step already described. The drummers and other musicians--twenty or twenty-five of them--marched in a contrary direction to and from and around the fire, inside the large ring; for at the distance kept by the outsiders the area was one hundred and fifty feet in diameter. The Apollonian emulators chanted the great deeds performed by the Cheyenne warriors. As they ended, the dying strain was caught up by the hundreds of the outside circle, who, in fast-swelling, loud tones, poured out the burden of their song. At this juncture the march was quickened, the scalps of the slain were borne aloft and shaken with wild delight, and shrill war-notes, rising above the furious din, accelerated the pulsation and strung high the nerves. Time-worn shields, careering in mad holders' hands, clashed; and keen lances, once reeking in Pawnee blood, clanged. Braves seized one another with an iron grip, in the heat of excitement, or chimed more tenderly in the chant, enveloped in the same robe with some maiden as they approvingly stepped through one of their own original polkas.