Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/179

 black shawls over bright calico dresses were buying meat, stabbing at it with dirty forefingers and haggling over the price. Dignified old bucks in store clothes, with red or yellow flannel worked into their braided hair, leaned against the counters. The store was their club house, but since it provided no chairs they stood, stoical and observant. Mixing among them, intent on tobacco or soda-water or tentatively inspecting a new shipment of hats from Texas, were the cowboys. A pretty half-breed girl with plucked eyebrows and bobbed hair was buying bread.

Little Dog was standing alone, surveying the crowd. He was a full-blood, heavy and muscular of figure and broad and swarthy of face. He had cut his braids, and save that he wore no necktie he was dressed in town clothing. The half-breed girl seemed impressed by him, and he gazed back at her with close-set, rather arrogant eyes.

It was only when she moved on that he saw Tom.

For a few seconds they stared each at the other, the Indian defiant, with a challenge, Tom merely watchful. It was the Indian who looked away first, but as he did so he smiled, a jeering smile that sent Tom's blood surging to his head. He knew then, as well as if it had been put into words, that Little Dog had killed the Miller, and that the shot had been meant for him. He even surmised that the tribe had sent him here after him.

He knew the Indians. Behind Little Dog, now buying cigarettes at the counter, he could see that conclave around the medicine man's fire.

"Ail Ai! Weasel Tail, our brother, has been done to death, and the white man's law has let the killer go free, and now our old men are too old to fight, and our young men have no blood in their veins, but only their mother's milk."

The small black pipe with its long stem passing from hand to hand, the lodge dimly lighted by its center fire, and perhaps the medicine man blowing smoke to the four directions of the world and seeking a sign. All the young bloods waiting and nervous, even Little Dog, for all his cut hair and store clothes; the air thick, the medicine pipe wrapped in