“Tell some of them,” said Orme.  “I, for one, might believe them.”

“Well, now,” said the plainsman, “I will tell you some things I have seen their medicine men do, and ye can believe me or not, the way ye feel about it.”

“I have seen ’em hold a pow-wow for two or three days at a time, some of ‘em settin’ ‘round, dreamin’, as they call it all of ’em starvin’, whole camp howlin’, everybody eatin’ medicine herbs.  Then after while, they all come and set down just like it was right out here in the open.  Somebody pulls a naked Injun boy right out in the middle of them.  Old Mr. Medicine Man, he stands up in the plain daylight, and he draws his bow and shoots a arrer plum through that boy.  Boy squirms a heap and Mr. Medicine Man socks another arrer through him, cool as you please—­I have seen that done.  Then the medicine man steps up, cuts off the boy’s head with his knife—­holds it up plain, so everybody can see it.  That looked pretty hard to me first time I ever seen it.  But now the old medicine man takes a blanket and throws it over this dead boy.  He lifts up a corner of the blanket, chucks the boy’s head under it, and pulls down the edges of the blanket and puts rocks on them.  Then he begins to sing, and the whole bunch gets up and dances ’round the blanket.  After while, say a few minutes, medicine man pulls off the blanket—­and thar gets up the boy, good as new, his head growed on good and tight as ever, and not a sign of an arrer on him ’cept the scars where the wounds has plumb healed up!”

Belknap laughed long and hard at this old trapper’s yarn, and weak as I was myself, I was disposed to join him.  Orme was the only one who did not ridicule the story.  Auberry himself was disgusted at the merriment.  “I knowed you wouldn’t believe it,” he said.  “There is no use tellin’ a passel of tenderfeet anything they hain’t seed for theirselves.  But I could tell you a heap more things.  Why, I have seen their buffalo callers call a thousand buffalo right in from the plains, and over the edge of a cut bank, where they’d pitch down and bust theirselves to pieces.  I can show you bones Of a hundred such places.  Buffalo don’t do that when they are alone—­thay have got to be called, I tell you.

“Injuns can talk with other animals—­they can call them others, too.  I have seed an old medicine man, right out on the plain ground in the middle of the village, go to dancin’, and I have seed him call three full-sized beavers right up out’n the ground—­seed them with my own eyes, I tell you!  Yes, and I have seed them three old beavers standin’ right there, turn into full-growed old men, gray haired.  I have seed ’em sit down at a fire and smoke, too, and finally get up when they got through, and clean out—­just disappear back into the ground.  Now, how you all explain them there things, I don’t pretend to say; but there can’t no man call me a liar, fur I seed ’em and seed ’em unmistakable.”