bullet cold enough."

A bullet pinged through the sharp air, as the Indians swarmed towards the
gate, and Yellow Arm, the chief, fell. The besiegers paused; and then,
as if at the command of the fallen man, they drew back, bearing him to
the camp, where they sat down and mourned.

Pierre watched them for a time; and, seeing that they made no further
move, retired into the store, where the Idiot muttered and was happy
after his kind. "Grah got pipe--blow away--blow away to Annie--pretty
soon."

"Yes, Grah, there's chance enough that you'll blow away to Annie pretty
soon," remarked the other.

"Grah have white eagles--fly, fly on the wind--oh, oh, bubble, bubble!"
and he sent the filmy globes floating from the pipe that a camp of river-
drivers had given the half-breed winters before.

Pierre stood and looked at the wandering eyes, behind which were the
torturings of an immense and confused intelligence; a life that fell
deformed before the weight of too much brain, so that all tottered from
the womb into the gutters of foolishness, and the tongue mumbled of chaos
when it should have told marvellous things. And the half-breed, the
thought of this coming upon him, said: "Well, I think the matters of hell
have fallen across the things of heaven, and there is storm. If for one
moment he could think clear, it would be great."

He bethought him of a certain chant, taught him by a medicine man in
childhood, which, sung to the waving of a torch in a place of darkness,