But the Sioux, fat with boudins and depouille and marrowbones, had waited long for the great Western train which should have appeared on the north side of the Platte, the emigrant road from the Council Bluffs.  For some days now they had known the reason, as Jim Bridger had explained—­the wagons had forded the river below the Big Island.  The white men’s medicine was strong.

The Sioux did not know of the great rendezvous at the forks of the Great Medicine Road.  Their watchmen, stationed daily at the eminences along the river bluffs of the north shore, brought back scoffing word of the carelessness of the whites.  When they got ready they, too, would ford the river and take them in.  They had not heeded the warning sent down the trail that no more whites should come into this country of the tribes.  It was to be war.

And now the smoke signals said yet more whites were coming in from the south!  The head men rode out to meet their watchmen.  News came back that the entire white nation now had come into the valley from the south and joined the first train.

Here then was the chance to kill off the entire white nation, their women and their children, so there would be none left to come from toward the rising sun!  Yes, this would end the race of the whites without doubt or question, because they all were here.  After killing these it would be easy to send word west to the Arapahoes and Gros Ventres and Cheyennes, the Crows, the Blackfeet, the Shoshones, the Utes, to follow west on the Medicine Road and wipe out all who had gone on West that year and the year before.  Then the Plains and the mountains would all belong to the red men again.

The chiefs knew that the hour just before dawn is when an enemy’s heart is like water, when his eyes are heavy, so they did not order the advance at once.  But a band of the young men who always fought together, one of the inner secret societies or clans of the tribe, could not wait so long.  First come, first served.  Daylight would be time to look over the children and to keep those not desired for killing, and to select and distribute the young women of the white nation.  But the night would be best for taking the elk-dogs and the spotted buffalo.

Accordingly a band from this clan swam and forded the wide river, crossed the island, and in the early evening came downstream back of a shielding fringe of cottonwoods.  Their scouts saw with amazement the village of tepees that moved on wheels.  They heard the bugle, saw the white nation gather at the medicine fire, heard them chant their great medicine song; then saw them disperse; saw the fires fall low.

They laughed.  The white nation was strong, but they did not put out guards at night!  For a week the Sioux had watched them, and they knew about that.  It would be easy to run off all the herd and to kill a few whites even now, beginning the sport before the big battle of to-morrow, which was to wipe out the white nation altogether.