Burns Red in the Sun dismounted and stalked proudly around camp, leaving the throng of women to dispose of the antelope, which they fell on and skinned in the time it takes to fill and light a pipe, and began to butcher with like speed. As to Old Lodge Skins, he walked his pony to a big but shabby tepee the cover of which, in between where it was patched, bore faded blue-and-yellow drawings—stick-men, scratchy animals, triangle-mountains, button-suns, and the like—got down, handed the single rein to a boy who was standing there in a leather breechclout and nothing else but moccasins, and ducking almost to his knees so his plug hat would clear and holding it besides, went in through the entrance hole.
“This here,” says my sister Caroline, “I believe, is home.” What I could see of her face when she turned in the saddle, looked definitely peaked. “But,” she went on, “would it be seemly for us to foller him indoors? That’s the question.”
“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.