Page:Hendryx--Connie Morgan with the Mounted.djvu/72

54 toward it. The squaws retired to the outer fires and Connie watched the fog-wraith eddy and swirl in their wake and settle heavily, like molasses poured from a jug.

Creeping cautiously from tepee to tepee, the boy worked his way toward the big fire. Now on hands and knees, now flattened into the trampled grass, as a dark form stalked past within reach of his hand. The fire blazed sullenly before the door of a tepee, the sides of which were thickly hung with caribou hides fantastically painted with ochre of dark red and saffron. Connie flattened himself close against the base of this tepee and watched the stolid, imperturbable faces of the Indians who squatted in a circle about the fire. "A council," he muttered, "I wonder where Rickey is?"

Suddenly, from the interior of the tepee close at his ear, sounded the beating of the drum, and a moment later a strange figure leaped into the circle of the firelight—a figure gaunt and fierce-eyed, and naked save for a gee-string, and several long necklaces of claws and teeth, and the dried bodies of birds. For fully a minute the figure stood motionless—rigid—gazing far into the fog as if to