they will sleep; his hand upon their teeth and they will be dull. The tribe will take the trail."

The words of the Chief flew through the village, and in their wake a groan followed. "If we take the trail we die!" muttered the people among themselves; yet the work of preparing for the march began and progressed rapidly. The little word of a chief is big; and the people feared Wazhinga Saba.

To one who has some acquaintance with the prairie, the insanity of moving an entire tribe, with its sickness and hunger, a distance of 200 miles in the dead of winter, is apparent. On the prairie there is treachery in the bluest winter sky. The Southwind that whines so abjectly in the morning, at noon may be crowned with a crown of ice in the silent North, and return a terrible Conqueror in the evening. The elemental Lackey becomes the elemental Emperor.

Wazhinga Saba, feeling that his rival was the product of the people's praise, wished to retaliate upon the people. He knew the consequences of such a movement in the winter, but the idea pleased him. He would make the tribe suffer. It would feel his power.

Throughout the village was the activity of an imminent departure. Drags were being fashioned, and upon these was packed the baggage of the tribe. There was no song among the toilers; but everywhere there was muttering and much hopeless shaking of the head. The people thought of the long trail and shivered.

One morning when the work was finished, through the pale and shivering light of the early dawn, the tribe filed out of its desolate village, and at its head walked Wazadi breaking the trail.

The sick, the old, and the children. were packed like baggage on the drags. In order that the trail might be easier for those who followed, the tribe proceeded in single file,

those who had extra ponies riding, and those who had none walking. So long was the column that the foremost were lost from from sight among the hills when the last left the village.

By midday a heavy fall of snow began. For three days and nights the snow came, soft and gentle as a kiss that goes before betrayel. Then during the fourth night the Northwest shouted and shook the people from their shivering sleep. It was the battle cry that could not be answered.

The poles of the hastily constructed tepees groaned with the blows of the storm; many were thrown to the ground, while the blankets that were wrapped about them flapped, tore and went with the wind. The light snow scurried along the ground with a hiss like the warning of a snake, caught the madness of the storm, leaped into the air, writhing, striking, biting!

It is easy to imagine the many elemental phenomena as being merely magnifications of human passions projected upon the universe. A cyclone is sudden anger; a southwind is feminine tenderness; a rainfall is grief; the spring sunshine is love. Madness is a conglomeration of all passions. A blizzard is the madness of the air! It has the fury and blindness of anger, the hiss of hate, the shout of joy, the dusk of melancholy, the shiver of fear, the coldness of jealousy; and when its force is spent, it folds its victims in a shroud of white, which may be the act of love a savage love!

A blizzard transforms. What it touches it leaves grotesque. It annihilates the boundary line of light and darkness. In its breath the night becomes merely a deepening of shadow upon the dim twilight of the day.

God wished to demonstrate to mankind the awful tragedy of unbridled passions, and his precept was the blizzard!

Chief also suffered; yet his selfishness was so great that to reach its ends, it ignored self. It was the apotheosis of egotism. Selfishness can become an inexorable god.

The hundreds of stumbling hoofs and feet left no trail. A foot-print was momentary and served only to catch the drifting snow. Many wandered from the column into the terrible loneliness of the storm and never re-appeared. Many more tottered with weakness and the cold and lay where they fell. Those who followed stumbled across these unfortunates, and felt no pity. Despair crept icily through the blood of the tribe.

Despair is pitiless because it is the annihilation of all passion and the exaltation of egotism. It is that condition of the mind when the democratic government of the passions is cast down and the ego seizes the throne of reason, becoming dictatorial in defense of its realm.

The tribe was desperate. There is a terrible strength and power of endurance in desperation. Hope avails to goad the limbs only until that moment when the limbs become feeble; then it vanishes in terror and despair fights defeat. More heroes have been made by the probability of failure than by the possibility of success. It is the difference between the narcotic and the stimulant.

With his teeth set and his face to the east, Wazadi led his people into the storm. Even he had forgotten the meaning of pity. There was rage in his heart; the rage of a brave man who is a fighter and faces great odds. The coward grows tender in the midst of danger. The brave man grows angry.

Wazadi struck at the storm with his clenched fists! He wished that the wind would materialize into a bear that he might grapple with it and die with his teeth set in its neck.

But a storm is an anger without

intelligence; a bodiless

enemy without nerves! It knows not its strength of offense and feels no blow of defense. It is irresistible and invulnerable.

The day lingered like a century, and when it had passed it was like a dream. The nights were terrible. Inaction lessens courage and increases suffering. Thus the three days passed, and the wind died. The white prairie emerged from the terrible shadow and the sun went down smiling like a cynic.

Wazadi looked upon his people and his heart grew sick. Hundreds were missing, and the survivors. were shadows of men. Many of the ponies had strayed into the storm, dragging with them the children, the sick and the old. And a great wail shook the frozen air. It was the return of conscious suffering after delirium.

But upon the next morning the tribe again took up the trail, and when the sun of the twelfth day reached the highest point in its brief arc, a great shout went up from the foremost of the tribe, for the broad, frozen river lay before them, and the trail was ended.

Immediately the entire tribe began the difficult task of building lodges from the frozen ground. The young and old, the squaws and the braves, threw their feeble efforts into the work and their hearts grew warm again with the warmth that clings about a home. They felt no hatred against their chief for their past suffering; no more than the sleeper feels against the night when awakened from a nightmare. They had not forgiven; they had forgotten. Joy was gigantic and left no nook for the dwelling place of hate.

In a few days the village was complete, and the tribe again settled down for the winter. But Wazhinga Saba was not happy. His heart was dull with the tedium that follows a dead triumph. The Chief wanted diversion; he wanted feasting merriment. Therefore he sent

runners about the village collecting a certain amount of meat from each lodge; and the people groaned as they gave, for they could see starvation stalking through the months of spring.

Then, for many months Wazhinga Saba ate with his puppet chiefs; and there was much laughter in the big lodge, much groaning without.

But the feasting lost its flavor and Wazhinga Saba longed for new pleasures. He found no beauty in his old women; years and toil and suffering had seamed their faces. Again he sent runners about the village, and this time they demanded the fairest of the maidens, whom he smiled upon in the evening and frowned upon in the morning.

To a primitive Indian, women were inviolate. They might toil and suffer, but they dared not be impure. An impure woman would have been stoned from the village.

So a great murmur of anger grew among the lodges; and all this indefinite muttering rage gathered and centralized in one voice. That voice was Wazadi. He stood in the center of a growing crowd of his tribesmen, and his voice was loud and fearless:

"Does my cry reach the ears of badgers? Are you brave but deaf? Are you strong but blind? Did Wakunda make the prairie and the people for Wazhinga Saba? Was it not enough that he gave us to be bitten by the winds? Are we wolves that we turn and flee not? The love which I gave to you at the summer's end, that love continues. I made you well; but Wazhinga Saba is worse sickness. Let us put this sickness from us!"

When the fearless youth had ceased speaking he became the center of a great shouting.

"Lead us! Be our chief!" the people cried.

"Wazadi will be your brother," he answered, "your brother and your chief. Let us build a village

of our own where Wazhinga Saba will not be."

The last words went among the people and divided them. Many shouted with approval; many only scowled and shook their heads. Their fear was greater than their hate.

That day Wazadi led his party carrying all its baggage out of the old village into the hills to the north, and there a new village was built. And the people of his party changed the bold youth's name, calling him Tawagaha (little village maker), and the name clung, and to this day it is as a great noise in the ears of the Omahas.

The winter grew old; the sun crept northward; the southwinds blew. The great hoarse voice of the river with its booming ice went like a herald before the approach of spring. The snow faded from the hills. The meadow-larks and the kildeers came back; the gophers chattered. The days grew balmy and the frogs sang again. The last ice of the winter crashed past and the big muddy river exulted like a thing with a heart. Greenness and warmth and sweet scents!

In either village there was not a throat that could not sing, save one. Wazhinga Saba still held the winter at his heart. The shadow of his. hate preserved the snow of his soul. While the broad sky and the vast prairie relented, he thought only of revenge.

Nothing can invent like a hate that lingers. It is a diabolical genius. It would burn away where love would wilt and weep. This is because it has nothing to lose; it has all to gain. If Leander had taken the flood that he might kill a sleeping rival, the Hellespont would have been narrower.

Wazhinga Saba sat in his lodge and plotted. He knew that the people believed him to be a terrible medicine man, a doer of magic things; yet he knew all his past successes to have depended merely

upon trickery. Therefore he would. not depend upon magic for his revenge, but merely as an appropriate setting for that revenge.

Several years before, the steamboats of the white man had sailed up the Missouri as far as the place where the Omahas were now camped, the American Fur Company having established a trading post in 1810 at Bellevue at a distance of about 150 miles down

stream.

Every spring and fall since then the company's boat, St. Ange, had made a trip to the foot of Blackbird Hill, where the Omahas had their winter village, in order to trade for the valuable furs which the Indians disposed of very cheaply.

Ever since Columbus first trod the American shore, the Indian has looked upon the white man as a being of superior powers; and the Omaha was no exception. Did not the Wahgah (big knife or white man) know the magic that made the talking stick and the sticks that walk? Did he not chain fire in the belly of his big canoe and make it snort with toil? Then might he not also possess some great mysterious medicine?

Sometimes thus ran the thoughts of Wazhinga Saba, and his heart became glad with the. gladness of a young revenge. He had at last formed a great plan.

One evening during the time when the squaws pull the weeds in the gardens (May), runners, sent to watch the river from the bluffs, came puffing into the tepee of Wazhinga Saba. "Monda Tonga! (big canoe) Wahgah! Wahgah!" they cried, motioning excitedly toward the river. At that moment the long sonorous howl of a steamboat's whistle came from the south and echoed in the bluffs. The Chief leaped to his feet, his face glowing with a great joy.

"Go! Bring the Wahgah to Wazhinga Saba!" he cried, and the runners bounded out of the tepee

and disappeared in the direction of the river. An hour later a half dozen white men led by the runners and followed by a curious mob of Omahas, approached the tepee of the Great Chief. The rabble, however, satisfied its curiosity at a respectful distance from the "talking sticks" which the traders carried.

With much ceremony Wazhinga Saba received his white brothers, and dispersed the crowd with a motion of his arm. The traders, through their interpreter, at once set about displaying a stock of gaudy trifles, but Wazhinga Saba would have none of them. He forthwith explained his peculiar needs.

"He wants some kind of strong medicine," said the interpreter to the traders.

"Tell him about whiskey," they said.

The interpreter talked with the Chief in the Omaha tongue.

"He wants to know what it can do," said the interpreter laughing. "Make much crazy," volunteered the traders, executing an extravagant pantomime of drunkenness : "So!"

Wazhinga Saba's face beamed as he watched the white man's insane evolutions. Perhaps he was mentally putting Tawagaha in the same ridiculous position. Yes! that was the medicine he wanted!

The interpreter explained, with much recourse to hyperbole, the great value of the medicine in question, and the Chief answered by showing the big stack of bison hides which he would give for ever so little. When a rich child wants anything a trade is easy; and when the traders withdrew from the Chief's tepee, Wazhinga Saba sat gloating over a jug of "medicine."

The next morning the St. Ange, well-stocked with buffalo hides, took the current, whistling like a live thing glad of a full stomach, and the Omahas took up their usual routine of life.