“Many of your relations are here,” some one said.  “They will protect you.”

Some young men seized and tied her, as her husband had said to do.  They had hard work to keep her mother from killing her. “Hai yah!” the old woman cried.  “There is my Snake woman daughter.  Let me split her head open.”

The fight was soon over.  The Piegans killed the people almost as fast as they came out of their lodges.  Some few escaped in the darkness.  When the fight was over, the young warriors gathered up a great pile of lodge poles and brush, and set fire to it.  Then the poor man tore the dress off his bad wife, tied the scalp of her dead Snake man around her neck, and told her to dance the scalp dance in the fire.  She cried and hung back, calling out for pity.  The people only laughed and pushed her into the fire.  She would run through it, and then those on the other side would push her back.  So they kept her running through the fire, until she fell down and died.

The old Snake woman had come out of the brush with her relations.  Because she had been so good, the Piegans gave her, and those with her, one-half of all the horses and valuable things they had taken. “Kyi!” said the Piegan chief.  “That is all for you, because you helped this poor man.  To-morrow morning we start back North.  If your heart is that way, go too and live with us.”  So these Snakes joined the Piegans and lived with them until they died, and their children married with the Piegans, and at last they were no longer Snake people.[1]

[Footnote 1:  When the Hudson’s Bay Company first established a fort at Edmonton, a daughter of one of these Snakes married a white employee of the company, named, in Blackfoot, O-wai, Egg.]

THE LOST CHILDREN

Once a camp of people stopped on the bank of a river.  There were but a few lodges of them.  One day the little children in the camp crossed the river to play on the other side.  For some time they stayed near the bank, and then they went up over a little hill, and found a bed of sand and gravel; and there they played for a long time.

There were eleven of these children.  Two of them were daughters of the chief of the camp, and the smaller of these wanted the best of everything.  If any child found a pretty stone, she would try to take it for herself.  The other children did not like this, and they began to tease the little girl, and to take her things away from her.  Then she got angry and began to cry, and the more she cried, the more the children teased her; so at last she and her sister left the others, and went back to the camp.