Raising the flap of the tepee, with its rusty stovepipe thrust through its much-patched canvas, I stooped in a puff of pleasant warmth and entered, placing my last armload of cottonwood chunks behind the sheet-iron stove. The old man threw back his blankets and sat up cross-legged upon the cowhide robes that served for bed, his gray hair straggling thinly to his shoulders about an aquiline face that had been handsome, surely, before time carved it to the bone. “_Palamo yelo, Kola_,” he said cheerily, as he fumbled in his long leather tobacco sack; “Thank you, friend. Now we can be warm and smoke together. You shall be my grandson, Wasichu[1] though you are; for it is no man’s fault how he is born, and your heart is as much Lakota[2] as mine. “It will be good to remember, as you wish. The story that I have will make me young again a little while, and you shall put it down there in your tongue as I could say it if your tongue were mine. Too many snows are heavy on my back, and when I walk, as you have seen, I am like an old three-legged horse, all bone and hide and always looking for the grass that used to be.” Eagle Voice chuckled at his picture of himself. “But it is only my body that stoops, remembering the mother ground,” he continued, “for I can feel my spirit standing tall above the snows and grasses that have been, and seeing much of good and evil days. There are battles to be fought, and ponies to be stolen, and coups to be counted. And there is happy hunting when the bison herds were wide as day, and meat was plenty, and the earth stayed young. That was before the rivers of Wasichus came in flood and made it old and shut us in these barren little islands where we wait and wait for yesterday. And there are visions to be seen again and voices to be heard from beyond the world. And far away on the other side of the great water towards the sunrise where I went when I was young, there are strange things to be remembered, strange ways, strange faces. And yonder there is a woman’s face, white and far away; and if it is good or bad I do not know. I remember, and am a boy in the night when the moon makes all the hills and valleys so that he wants to sing; but something afraid is hiding in the shadows.” The old man lit the pipe and his lean cheeks hollowed with a long draw upon the stem. The brooding face went dim behind a slowly emitted cloud of smoke, to emerge presently, shining with a merry light. “_Washtay!_” he exclaimed, with a look of triumph; “_Lela washtay!_” “What is very good, Grandfather?” I asked. “It is what I see clearer than all the rest,” he answered, passing the pipe to me; “and that is very strange, for many things were bigger long ago.” He thought awhile, a slow smile spreading until, with a look grotesquely young, he fell to giggling like a mischievous boy. Then his face went sober, and fixing serious eyes upon me he said with great dignity and deliberation: