At times old Auberry growled at this new feature of the landscape.  “That was not here when I first came West,” he said, “and I don’t like its looks.  The old ways were good enough.  Now they are even talkin’ of runnin’ a railroad up the valley—­as though horses couldn’t carry in everything the West needs or bring out everything the East may want.  No, the old ways were good enough for me.”

Orme smiled at the old man.

“None the less,” said he, “you will see the day before long, when not one railroad, but many, will cross these plains.  As for the telegraph, if only we had a way of tapping these wires, we might find it extremely useful to us all right now.”

“The old ways were good enough,” insisted Auberry.  “As fur telegraphin’, it ain’t new on these plains.  The Injuns could always telegraph, and they didn’t need no poles nor wires.  The Sioux may be at both ends of this bend, for all we know.  They may have cleaned up all the wagons coming west.  They have planned for a general wipin’ out of the whites, and you can be plumb certain that what has happened here is knowed all acrost this country to-day, clean to the big bend of the Missouri, and on the Yellowstone, and west to the Rockies.”

“How could that be?” asked Orme, suddenly, with interest.  “You talk as if there were something in this country like the old ‘secret mail’ of East India, where I once lived.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” said Auberry, “but I do know that the Injuns in this country have ways of talkin’ at long range.  Why, onct a bunch of us had five men killed up on the Powder River by the Crows.  That was ten o’clock in the morning.  By two in the afternoon everyone in the Crow village, two hundred miles away, knowed all about the fight—­how many whites was killed, how many Injuns—­the whole shootin’-match.  How they done it, I don’t know, but they shore done it.  Any Western man knows that much about Injun ways.”

“That is rather extraordinary,” commented Orme.

“Nothin’ extraordinary about it,” said Auberry, “it’s just common.  Maybe they done it by lookin’-glasses and smokes—­fact is, I know that’s one way they use a heap.  But they’ve got other ways of talkin’.  Looks like a Injun could set right down on a hill, and think good and hard, and some other Injun a hundred miles away’d know what he was thinkin’ about.  You talk about a prairie fire runnin’ fast—­it ain’t nothin’ to the way news travels amongst the tribes.”

Belknap expressed his contempt for all this sort of thing, but the old man assured him he would know more of this sort of thing when he had been longer in the West.  “I know they do telegraph,” reiterated the plainsman.

“I can well believe that,” remarked Orme, quietly.

“Whether you do or not,” said Auberry, “Injuns is strange critters.  A few of us has married among Injuns and lived among them, and we have seen things you wouldn’t believe if I told you.”