He took the pipe and smoked awhile. “_Dho_,” he continued, “we did not go home. Our relatives were kind to us. There were bison in plenty. There were no soldiers to chase us. There were valleys and streams like ours at home; but when I rode along a valley, something was not there; and when I looked at a hill, it was a stranger. There were no great deeds to be done and no great honors to win. When I was a boy, and the sun would come up, something wonderful might happen that day. It was not so any more. Stories came from the agencies, and they were about hunger and sickness and the forked tongues of the Wasichus. The soldiers even took away the people’s horses. Pa Sapa was full of crazy Wasichus digging up the yellow metal. “Grasses came forth and died, and the snow fell. Again the grass was new and died and there was snow. Maybe next grass everything would be better, and we would go home. We did not go home. The stories that came to us were not good. Afterwhile we got used to the strange land. Then I got married. “She was a Hunkpapa girl and her right name was Plenty White Cows. People called her Woman Who Died, and they told about a strange power she had. She made charms for her two brothers, so that what they tried to do, they could do it; and with these charms they had won great honors in war. Also she could see things that were going to happen. “She was older than I was, but she was a girl yet. I think maybe young men were a little afraid of her because of the stories people told, and she was not very strong--maybe because she had died once and gone to the world of spirits. I will tell you how it was, the way people told it; for it had been made into a story for anybody to tell. “When Plenty White Cows was just a little girl, maybe five or six winters old, a strange sickness came upon her. The _wichasha wakon_ could do nothing, and so she died. At that time her father and mother were camping with some other Hunkpapas at Slim Buttes, north of Pa Sapa. And when their girl was dead, they prepared her for the other world and put her on a scaffold, the way I have told you. Then the band broke camp and moved on towards Mini Shoshay, and the father and mother and brothers went wandering and mourning. This was when the Moon of Black Cherries [August] was young, and it was a time of no storms. “There was a man whose name was Against the Clouds. He and his woman were Sans Arcs. They had been visiting with relatives in Grandmother’s Land, and they were on their way back to Bear Butte near Pa Sapa, where the Sans Arcs would be camping. They were traveling alone with two horses to ride and one to pull the drag. It was not very far between sleeps, for they were getting to be old people and they would be tired when there was yet much day. Also, they were having a good time together, because the weather was so pleasant. They were not in a hurry to be at home, because their children were dead and they had no family.