“Pooh!  I ain’t stealing chickens.  Do you take me for a nigger?  I’m a noble Red-man and Head Chief at that, I want you to know, an’ I’ve a notion to collect that scalp you’re wearin’ now.  You know it belongs to me and Yan,” and he sidled over, rolling his eye and working his fingers in a way that upset Guy’s composure.  “And I tell you a feller with one foot in the grave should have his thoughts on seriouser things than chicken-stealing.  This yere morbid cravin’ for excitement is rooinin’ all the young fellers nowadays.”

Yan happened to glance at Caleb.  He was gazing off at nothing, but there was a twinkle in his eye that Yan never before saw there.

“Let’s go to the teepee.  It’s too hot out here.  Come in, won’t you, Mr. Clark?”

“Hm.  ’Tain’t much cooler in here, even if it is shady,” remarked the old Trapper.  “Ye ought to lift one side of the canvas and get some air.”

“Why, did the real Injuns do that?”

“I should say they did.  There ain’t any way they didn’t turn and twist the teepee for comfort.  That’s what makes it so good.  Ye kin live in it forty below zero an’ fifty ‘bove suffocation an’ still be happy.  It’s the changeablest kind of a layout for livin’ in.  Real hot weather the thing looks like a spider with skirts on and held high, an’ I tell you ye got to know the weather for a teepee.  Many a hot night on the plains I’ve been woke up by hearing ‘Tap-tap-tap’ all around me in the still black night and wondered why all the squaws was working, but they was up to drop the cover and drive all the pegs deeper, an’ within a half hour there never failed to come up a big storm.  How they knew it was a-comin’ I never could tell.  One old woman said a Coyote told her, an’ maybe that’s true, for they do change their song for trouble ahead; another said it was the flowers lookin’ queer at sundown, an’ another had a bad dream.  Maybe they’re all true; it comes o’ watchin’ little things.”

“Do they never get fooled?” asked Little Beaver

’Oncet in awhile, but not near as often as a White-man would.

“I mind once seeing an artist chap, one of them there portygraf takers.  He come out to the village with a machine an’ took some of the little teepees.  Then I said, ’Why don’t you get Bull-calf’s squaw to put up their big teepee?  I tell you that’s a howler.’  So off he goes, and after dickering awhile he got the squaw to put it up for three dollars.  You bet it was a stunner, sure—­all painted red, with green an’ yaller—­animals an’ birds an’ scalps galore.  It made that feller’s eyes bug out to see it.  He started in to make some portygrafs, then was taking another by hand, so as to get the colours, an’ I bet it would have crowded him to do it, but jest when he got a-going the old squaw yelled to the other—­the Chief hed two of them—­an’ lighted out to take down that there teepee.  That artist he hollered to stop, said he had hired it to stay up an’