A one-room log cabin, with an indolently smoking chimney, squatted in sullen destitution a hundred yards away. Before the door a ramshackle wagon stood waiting for nothing with its load of snow. Down yonder in the brushy draw an all-but-roofless shed stared listlessly upon the dull February sky. With a man-denying look, the empty reservation landscape round about lay hushed and bluing in the cold.
Raising the flap of the tepee, with its rusty stovepipe thrust through its much-patched canvas, I stooped in a puff of pleasant warmth and entered, placing my last armload of cottonwood chunks behind the sheet-iron stove.
The old man threw back his blankets and sat up cross-legged upon the cowhide robes that served for bed, his gray hair straggling thinly to his shoulders about an aquiline face that had been handsome, surely, before time carved it to the bone.
“Palamo yelo, Kola,” he said cheerily, as he fumbled in his long leather tobacco sack; “Thank you, friend. Now we can be warm and smoke together. You shall be my grandson, Wasichu though you are; for it is no man’s fault how he is born, and your heart is as much Lakota as mine.
“It will be good to remember, as you wish. The story that I have will make me young again a little while, and you shall put it down there in your tongue as I could say it if your tongue were mine. Too many snows are heavy on my back, and when I walk, as you have seen, I am like an old three-legged horse, all bone and hide and always looking for the grass that used to be.”
