Page:Life Among the Piutes.djvu/146

 Then I heard Egan say, “Is Sarah asleep? We had better talk to her now for fear Reinhard will find out she is here, and send her away, as he did before.”

So my cousin came and told me that the chiefs Egan and Oytes wanted to have a talk with me. I did not dare to say no, so I got up and went to the council-tent. As I went in, Chief Egan introduced me to the Bannocks. He told them I was their former interpreter at the agency, and that I was their teacher also.

“She has done everything in her power for us,” he said, “and our praying agent discharged her for no other cause than that Oytes and I took her to Camp Harney to report him. Therefore you need not be afraid to talk to her. She is our friend. Tell her all your troubles. I know she will help you.”

Egan stopped talking and then Bannock Jack went on and said,—

“You say our great chieftain’s daughter is good, and you say she can talk on paper, too, and therefore I will ask her if she heard what the papers are saying about our troubles at Fort Hall?”

When this question was put to me I told them I had been living quite a way from Canyon City, and had not seen the papers, and could not tell them anything about it.”

“Well,” said Bannock Jack, “you can talk on paper.”

I said “Yes, I could.” Then he said, “Will you be so kind as to write down all I will tell you?”

Then I sent for some paper and a pencil to write it down as he asked me to. He went on and told me the very same thing that my people had already told me when they came to see me at St. John Day’s Valley, except this: Bannock Jack said the white people had told their chiefs to go and get the two men who had killed the two white men.