“The shooting ahead yonder was louder when I was over the first hills. I was riding my step-father’s horse that he brought from Grandmother’s Land, and it was a strong horse; so I was up with the fronters. My heart sang again. Maybe I would die on the prairie after all, and High Horse would be waiting and he would see me far off and come running to meet me. “Then all at once the wagon-guns stopped shooting. It was still over there. “When we came to the top of the last hill, we saw the butchering. There is a long crooked ravine and it runs down to a flat valley beside the Wounded Knee. Along the ravine horseback soldiers were galloping this way and that way, all mixed up. They were hunting down the women and children who were still alive. The men were dead down yonder in the valley where the butchering began. “There were not many of us on the hilltop yet, but we could see others coming behind us, and we charged down along the ravine. _Hokay-hey! Hoka-hey!_ But our horses were worn out and could hardly gallop. I think the soldiers did not know that we were few; and when they saw others coming over the hill, they did not wait to fight us there. They ran away towards the valley where there were more soldiers, and they were getting off their horses to dig and fight lying down. “When we charged down beside the ravine, there were dead women and children scattered in it where the wagon-guns-that-shoot-twice [Hotchkiss guns] caught them running away. Up on the hillside above the ravine, there were some women and children huddled together in a gully, and they screamed to us as we passed. “It was not much of a fight. There were too many soldiers and we were few, and the wagon-guns shot at those coming over the hill behind us. “We circled back up along the hillside to where a few women and children were still living.” The old man paused and sat for a while with closed eyes. When he looked at me again his face was aglow with a pervasive smile. “That is where I found the road, Grandson,” he said. His voice was low and gentle, with a quaver of age in it. “That is where I found the road. “I did not know her at first. The last time I saw her she was a girl yet; but that was when I went to Grandmother’s Land after the Rubbing Out of Long Hair. She was older and heavier, and she was holding a child under her blanket. I did not know her until she looked up at me, crying hard, and said, ‘O _Shonka ’kan! Shonka ’kan!_ They have killed him! They have killed him!’ Then I knew Tashina’s eyes with the tears in them.” The light went out of the old man’s face, and again he sat silent. “It was not very far from there across the hills to the little gray log house on White Horse Creek,” he continued at length. “I put her on my horse and led him, walking, and all the while she held the child close under her blanket, crying hard. It was a little boy and he was dead.