Page:War Drums (1928).pdf/24

 passed on without a word—thin, leathery men, bushy-bearded, wearing raccoon caps, high leggins of deerskin, and long, fringed hunting shirts of the same material held in at the waist by broad leather belts. Their weapons were the long rifle, the tomahawk and the hunting knife; and their horses were of the Chicasaw breed, one a claybank and the other a piebald, small and wiry, but still revealing in their shapely heads and clean limbs their blooded Andalusian ancestry. Next came a squat, powerfully built Indian on a fine iron-gray stallion; a Choctaw war captain, Lachlan judged him from his paint and his silver ornaments, his mantle decked with fox-tails and the strange flatness of his forehead. He looked neither to right nor left; and Lachlan, too, gazed past him with a face grown suddenly stern, for he had no love for the Choctaws. Behind this stone-faced chief rode three other Indians of the same tribe, all well mounted, all painted and feathered, two armed with stout, polished bows and quivers of spotted fawn-skin, the third carrying a musket of French make. Followed, then, the first of the pack ponies, plodding onward under their great bundles of skins—deer skins, bear skins, even a few shaggy skins of buffalo; and riding beside the burden-bearers came the packhorse drivers, some of them Indians of the meaner sort hired with rum for this arduous service, most of them white men who seemed more Indian than white because of their fantastic Indian finery.