"Your brother was such a one as should have been an Indian, and so I thought to make him. He fears neither the darkness nor the flood nor the lightning, the buffalo stampede nor the rush and shouting of armed men. No lad of my tribe can shoot straighter than he and he rides a horse as the gray goose rides the north wind. He learned our speech more quickly than a Cheyenne, of our own race, could have learned it, and he came to love our life; I know, for he told me so, often. And he loved me, who sought to be as his father, and my squaw, Techon-su-mons-ka (The Sandbar), and his foster brothers and sisters, Mah-to-che-ga (The Little Bear), Ka-pes-ka-da (The Shell), and Mong-shong-sha (The Bending Willow). Your brother himself I called Pah-ta-ustah (Fire Eyes), and so the tribe will ever know him. "But even after I came to be chief of my band, twelve moons ago, when the old chief was killed in battle with the Crows beyond the river where the elks drink (the Yellowstone), he would talk to me of his own people. He would talk of his father and mother and you, Al Briscoe, and of a girl papoose he called Annie, and of the place where he once lived, far in the South, where there is more forest than prairie, and where many trees bear upon their branches red and yellow fruit larger than the largest plums we know. Many and many a time I have talked with him of those things in the hours when the sun has gone to sleep and the tepee fires wink back at the stars. And since he grieved always for those who had been his family, and since I knew that I had been one to stand by while his father was killed (which was a bad deed and hurt my heart) it came to me at last that I must put him in the way to go back to his own people. It is true, too, that the life of the Indian is not now, and never will be any more, what it was in the past. Our days are numbered in the land of our fathers, and those who are young among us have little to look forward to." Te-o-kun-ko spoke the last sentences sadly, looking far off into the yellow western sky as if he saw there visions of the last refuge of his race. Then he threw back his head and concluded, abruptly, "So I took him southward and one moon ago I left him at the trading post above the mouth of the Wak-pah-shika (Bad River), which is called Fort La Framboise. Then I sped back to bear my part in the battle against your army." "What?" exclaimed Al, in great excitement, stepping close to Te-o-kun-ko as the scout interpreted his last sentences, "You took him to Fort La Framboise? He is there now?" The Indian inclined his head slowly. "Yes," he replied, "if he has not already gone to the southward." Al pressed his hand to his brow. His mind was in a whirl of bewilderment.