Before each lodge a warrior established himself, crosslegged, and began to smoke. When the sun dipped behind the Hills and threw their long shadows silently out across to the Bad Lands, the chill of twilight struck in, and so the Indians wrapped themselves closely in their blankets. As by a stroke of enchantment, with the concealment of the shirts and overalls, the Past returned. Against the sky of evening, the silhouettes of the pointed wigwams and the suggestion of the shrouded warriors smoking solemnly, silently, their pipes, all belonged to the nomadic age before such men as Michaïl Lafond had "civilized" the country. After a time they rose and departed silently to the bottom-land for a while, leaving Lafond in charge of the two young men. They had gone to eat their suppers. The half-breed had not tasted food since the early morning, nor slept for thirty odd hours. The stars came out one by one, and the stillness of that great inland sea men call the prairies fell on the world. Such occasional sounds as rose from the creek bottom seemed but to emphasize the peace. And then suddenly, from the shadows somewhere, without disturbance, the blanketed figures appeared and took their places again. A squaw came bearing a torch, and lit the fire in the centre of the circle, and there sprang up a broad shaft of light which drew about the little scene a great canopy of imminent blackness. From hand to hand passed a great red-stone calumet or pipe. Each warrior puffed at it twice and passed it to his neighbor. It was not offered to Michaïl Lafond, whose bonds had now been loosened. After each of the seated warriors had taken his part in this ceremony, and the pipe had completed the circle to Lone Wolf, that chief arose, throwing back his blanket from his shoulders. With a sudden chill of fear, Michaïl Lafond saw that he was to assist at a state council of the sort held only when the tribe is to sit in judgment on one of its own number. The savage was naked to the waist. In his hair, worn loose and unbraided after the Sioux fashion, three eagle feathers with white tips were thrust slantwise across the back of his head; and under its heavy mass his fierce bright eyes and hawk face gleamed impressively. About his neck hung a fringe of bears' claws, from which depended a round silver medal. Now as he stood there--the lithe strength of his bronze torso revealed one arm clasping the blanket about his waist, the other holding loosely at his side the feather-bedecked calumet of sandstone--the stigma of sordidness and drunkenness and squalor seemed to fall away, so that the spectator would have seen in this group of silent men under the silent western heavens only the pomp and pride of a great and savage people in the zenith of its power. Lone Wolf stood for the space of several minutes without a sign. Then with a magnificently sweeping gesture he held the calumet aloft and began to speak.