“Caroline,” I answered, “I am raw and sore from this riding, and my Pa is dead and my Ma is far away, and that white dog is still alongside watering at the mouth. I am scared to get down.”

At that some of my sister’s spirit returned. “I sure won’t let a dirty little dog stop me,” she said with heat, and having flipped her leg over the saddle, raking me with a bootheel in the process, she dropped to the ground. The dog ignored her utterly. Taking her cue from the chief, she also give her rein to the Indian kid, who was staring at me out of his bright black eyes. For racial reasons I didn’t take to him, but I jerked my thumb at the dog, who was waiting for nothing in the world but my coming down where it could conveniently get at me.

Being a shrewd lad, he got the idea and fetched the cur a foot in the rump that sent it whining off. So added to my natural bias against him was that favor, and I hopped to the ground with my nose lifted and on the strength of spite trailed Caroline as she took a big gulp of air and entered the lodge.

It was marvelously dark in there, coming from the outdoor brightness of afternoon, and whatever you could see owed to the presence of a little buffalo-chip fire in the center of the floor and such light as fell through the smokehole at the top of the cone. Now if the outside smell was remarkably ripe, you could never recall it after one whiff of indoors a tepee, where it was like trying to breathe underwater in a swamp.

After a while I could make out a stout woman stirring a pot over the fire, but she didn’t lift her head at us. All round the circumference of the lodge were dark forms, their heads against the skin wall and feet pointing towards the middle, which closer inspection showed to be not persons recumbent but hairy buffalo robes. It was so dark we had to traipse from one to another, never knowing but that the next might be occupied by some savage who might take the intrusion very ill. We had half-circled the fire before locating Old Lodge Skins, whose bed was directly opposite the door. He was sitting silent there, and Caroline almost fell over him, catching herself at the last minute on a tepee pole from which was dangling a number of skin bags and bundles containing such few private possessions as an Indian owns.

The chief held a stone pipe which had a wooden shank a foot and a half in length and was decorated with a series of brass tacks that winked in the firelight. We just stood watching him, on account of having no place else to go. He filled his pipe bowl from a little leather pouch and then the stout woman put a stick in the fire until it caught and blew it into a burning coal, fetching it to him, who thereupon lighted up, sucking so hard his cheeks caved in like a skull’s. Owing to the length of the stem, it was powerful hard to keep one of them pipes going, but he got it to where he was satisfied, then all at once shoved it towards Caroline.

My sister, mannish as she tended to be, however had not smoked nor chewed her life long. She admired the pipe kindly and passed it back to Skins. The chief correctly supposed she didn’t savvy what was wanted, and indicated with his fingers she should sit down upon the buffalo robe at his right. Then Old Lodge Skins leaned across and placed the end of the stem in her mouth, while mimicking with his own lips the action of smoking.

Caroline accepted the mouthpiece and went to puffing according to Old Lodge Skins’s model. Of course, to her this, I believe, was a type of sexual ritual or the like. The chief, however, was muttering incantations against what he thought was her bad medicine directed at him, and the fact that she had taken the pipe encouraged him to believe that his charms would work, because an Indian holds by smoking above all things.

Old Lodge Skins finally took the device away when it got to where she was expelling only a thin vapor, and Caroline gasped and chewed awhile on her neckerchief. She was panting for a goodly time after, but never passed out and didn’t puke. Caroline was a pretty tough old girl.

The chief now loosened the ashes in the pipe bowl and poured them out on the toes of Caroline’s boots, so as to give her bad luck, only we didn’t know that at the time. Then he stoked up again from his beaded pouch with what was actually in small part tobacco, the rest being made up of red-willow bark, sumac leaves, the marrow from buffalo bones, and several other ingredients. Indians of course invented the habit of smoking, and almost nothing else.

By the time he had smoked his own bowl out, Old Lodge Skins changed his whole style. He grinned, he spoke a good deal of Cheyenne in an affable tone, and he said something to the woman at the fire that was apparently orders, for she left directly and come back with a fresh hunk of antelope from the carcass earlier referred to.

This moon-faced woman hacked up the flesh and throwed it in the pot with the mess already simmering there. I figure it was on account of the smell that while the meal was cooking a bunch of Indians began to show up at the tepee. First come that boy who took the horses, and then another stoutish woman who from the back was a dead ringer for the cook, and a tiny girl wearing not a stitch and a slightly bigger lad likewise; next appeared a fine tall fellow about twenty-five years of age; and finally Burns Red in the Sun, the breadwinner himself, still in his mask of clay, and just behind him a procession beginning with a slender woman with a great fall of loosely braided black hair and eyes soft as a doe. Three or four kids followed her, the oldest about six.

These people squatted around the circle of the lodge wall and had eyes for nothing but that pot. Most of them brought their own wooden bowls and some had spoons of the same or else horn. They never uttered a sound, and not once did they so much as glance at me and Caroline.

After a bit the cook ladled out a bowl each for my sister and me, and then the others gathered around and got theirs. Old Lodge Skins didn’t eat a thing, just sat there on his buffalo hides and looked grand.

Now it happened that I remembered how the redskins that had come to our wagons always said “How, how” when they ate biscuit and drank coffee. I still felt mighty uneasy about the whole situation, and though I was terrible hungry, that meal did very little for my peace of mind: it was pretty strong, I’ll tell you. The antelope chunks weren’t too well done. Indians don’t have a prejudice against grease, on the one hand; and on the other, they weren’t given in those days to using salt. Along with the meat was some chokecherries all cooked to a mush, and a root or two that didn’t have a taste until you swallowed it and it fell all the way to your belly and gave off the aftereffect of choking on sand.

But, as I say, I recalled that courteous remark and put it. I wanted them people to like me. They weren’t paying no attention to us yet, but I had seen how Indians could change. “How, how, how,” said I, right to Old Lodge Skins. It took a bit of nerve. Caroline give me a poke, but the chief was considerably pleased.

In fact, he shot it right back at me, “How, how,” and then spoke something that turned out, after I learned to parley in Cheyenne, to be my first Indian name: Little Antelope, which was Voka in that lingo and sounded like a cough. As a name it had no undue importance since I got several more in time, but was a start. At least I hadn’t been scalped for uttering the sentiment, which I had considered not unlikely, for you probably ain’t got no conception of what it resembles to be a boy of ten newly joined a pack of barbarians.

And Caroline got a favor, because while the chief was grinning at me, I saw her fish a big hunk of meat from her bowl and slip it outside under the tepee skin, where a dog could be heard to gnaw it up straightway, because you never find a nook or cranny in an Indian camp that don’t have a dog right at hand.