But I do not like to tell."
"You have told me so much, you must tell me the rest."
"The white man is a soldier at the fort."
"A common soldier?"
"No, a chief, who carries a sword."
"Oh, an officer. What is his name?"
"He is called Barrows."
"Oh! And he offered Running Bear whisky for your secret? That is bad."
"Yes. Chief Barrows wants the secret, and he has sent the man who drives
cows here to make me tell it."
"Singing Bird, you must tell me the secret."
"I will."
Stella settled herself to hear the Indian girl's story.
"It began when I was a little child," said Singing Bird. "One time when
my father's tribe was hunting, we came to a place where a lot of white
men were digging in the sands of the big, muddy river."
"Was that the Missouri?"
"The white men call it so. We camped beside them, and one day I saw them
washing out of the sand little grains of yellow metal, which they
thought much of, although the Indians would rather have iron, the black
metal."
"They were hunting for gold."
"Yes. In their talk with my father they said that somewhere up the river
was the mother of the gold, where all this came from. They asked my
father if he knew where it was.
"Now, my father had found where there was plenty of the yellow metal.
But he, too, was shrewd, and, seeing that the white men prized it so
highly, he thought he would go back and get the gold, and sell it to the
white men for iron and shot and powder and blankets.
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