Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/151

 saddles with which to etch on the brand, or looking out for sick and unthrifty cattle. But most of them were following the sun.

In the endless discussions around the long oilcloth covered table Tom took little part. Not only was his future vague in the extreme, but the joy of life, after that first home-coming, had gone out of him. His pride was hurt, his heart sore. He was less truculent than he had ever been.

Only once did his quick temper show itself. He was getting ready to turn in one night when some one of the crowd playing in the next room began to sing. "I ain't got no father. I ain't got no"

He jerked the door open savagely.

"Stop that racket," he said, "and let a fellow get to sleep."

"Why, you ain't turned in yet."

"I'm telling you," he said shortly, and closed the door. It was Bill who broke the silence that followed.

"I feel kinda better about Tom now," he said. "He was so gentle before I thought maybe he was fixing to get sick."

The news from the Reservation was not good.

With the arrival of winter the Indians were moving from their tepees into their bleak untidy houses, where the younger generation had set up hideous sagging white iron beds, with an occasional rocking chair or cheap oak bureau, ordered by catalogue through the post trader; but where the old full-bloods still slept on their buffalo robes on the floor. The squaws were taking off the hide or canvas coverings of their summer homes and folding them away, and the lodge poles stood like gaunt skeletons; the ashes and stones of their dead fires exposed little hearths now desecrated and abandoned.

Only the medicine man, Howling Wolf, still remained in his tepee, carefully tended by his wives, a trade blanket over his knees as he sat on his skin couch, his medicine pipe tiedto a pole over his head.

The Reservation doctor, making his daily visits to Weasel Tail, found him one day in his house on the floor, lying among skins so old and filthy that he made a protest to one of his wives.