One time no Long Knife would have laughed.

Perhaps it was only a young Indian and his woman wrestling in the bushes, or a young antelope come down to dip its black nose to the muddy water, with its quick, delicate tongue daintily slaking its thirst.

Then Old Bear’s eyes saw the blurred image of a rider on a paint horse.

“Hou Kola!” cried a strong voice, from across the river, carrying the accent of one of the western dialects. Then the figure moved toward him.

It was a man on a paint horse, splashing across the river. Twice the rider cried out, urging his horse through the sluggish, turbid water.

Old Bear strained his eyes, the better to make out the figure on horseback. The horse had stepped from the water, dripping and shaking its head.

“Hou,” said the man, an Indian, who now on horseback approached Old Bear. He had lifted his right hand which was open and bore no weapon.

“Hou,” said Old Bear, who also lifted his weapon hand, empty.

Old Bear grunted in surprise.

The man, like Old Bear, was dressed in the full regalia of a Plains warrior. Four eagle feathers, tied together, dangled from his left braid over his left shoulder; he wore buckskin, and a colored vest wrought with dyed porcupine quills; about his neck was a necklace of puma claws. He carried a lance, some nine feet long, and worked with blue and white beads. It was tipped with a long point of bluish, chipped stone and tailed with the wing feather of a hawk. His buffalo-hide shield carried the design of a coming moon, and his face was painted with radiating yellow lines, proclaiming the beginning of a new day.

This is no simple warrior, said Old Bear, looking on the paint. This is a medicine man.

Most surprising to Old Bear was that the man was so much younger than he, not young as a boy is young, but much younger than Old Bear-and yet, though so young, this man did not look as though he had ever tugged at the wheel of a wagon, as if he had ever touched the handle of a plow or thrown seed to domestic fowl.