Old Captain Sides was standing before his house.  He was tall and dignified.

“Yesh—­he’s broke the law,” he agreed.  “Mebbe my boys, they’s get him.”

[Illustration:  “Yesh—­he’s broke the law.”]

That was all, but a strange thing happened.  On the following night four grim Piutes brought Cayuse from his mountain retreat.  They were all his kinsmen, uncles, brothers, and cousins.  He was taken to a council in the brush, a family council with Captain Sides as Chieftain, Magistrate, and father of the tribe.  And a solemn procedure followed.  Cayuse was formally charged with infraction of the law and asked for his defense.  He had no defense—­nothing but justification.  He admitted the killing, and told of why it had been done.  He had taken an eye for an eye.

“I have broken the white man’s law,” he said.  “The white man first broke mine.  I’m ready to pay.  The Indian stands no show to get away.  I broke the law, and I am glad.  They want my life.  That’s all right.  That’s the law.  But I don’t want the white man to hang me.  That ain’t good Indian way.  My people can satisfy this law.  They can shoot me like a man.  No white is going to hang Cayuse, and that’s all I’ve got to say.”

To an Anglo Saxon mind this attitude is not to be readily comprehended.  To the Indian members of Cayuse’s clan it addressed itself as wisdom, logic, and right.  The council agreed to his demands.  The case, historical, but perhaps not unique, has never been widely known.

As solemnly as doom itself, the council proceeded with its task.  Some manner of balloting was adopted, and immediate members of the Cayuse totem drew lots as to which must perform the lawful deed.  It fell to a brother of the prisoner—­a half-brother only, to be accurate, since the doomed man’s father had been white.

Together Cayuse and this kinsman departed from the camp, walking forth through the darkness in the brush.  They chatted in all pleasantness, upon the way.  Cayuse could have broken and run.  He never for a moment so much as entertained the thought.

They came to a place appropriate, and, still in all friendliness, backed by a sense of justice and of doom, the guiltless brother shot the half-breed dead—­and the chapter, with the Indians, was concluded.

Van was gone three days from Goldite camp.  He returned and reported all that had been done.  He had seen the executed man.  An even thirty dollars he accepted for his time, and with it bought food for his partners.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

BETH MAKES DEMANDS

Beth Kent, while the camp was writing its feverish annals, had undergone emotions in the whole varied order of the gamut.  She had felt herself utterly deserted and utterly unhappy.  She had hoped against hope that Van would come, that something might explain away his behavior, that she herself might have an opportunity of ascertaining what had occurred.