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INDIAN TRAGEDIES AND ROMANCES.

away to some spot, where he can sleep for many hours without disturbance.

Gambling and drinking are by no means the only amusements of the winter camp. Story telling is a gift which always makes its owner a favorite person among the lodges. Bucks, squaws, and children crowd the teepe in which he inay be, listening hour after hour during the long winter evenings to the marvelous yarns which he makes up as he goes along. His story is both filthy and pointless, a confused jumble of men, animals, and mythical monsters.

On fine winter days the men and boys often indulge in horse races. The Indian rider is awkward in the extreme. His stirrups are short, his back humped, his head thrust forward in a ridiculous position. Yet this laughable equestrian will pick up a small coin from the ground when his horse is at full speed. Various methods of racing are in vogue. Sometimes it simply consists in rushing a pony at full speed toward a tree, the one first touching it being winner. The same method is sometimes employed with a different goal. A heavy pole is set up horizontally about six feet from the ground. The racers dash forward, regardless of life or limb. If one stops his horse too soon, he fails to touch the pole, and is beaten; if too late, his horse passes under the pole, while he himself is caught and thrown heavily backward on the ground, under the hoofs of the ponies behind him.

In a third kind of race two strips of buffalo hide are fastened to stakes in the ground about eight feet apart. The racers start from a point two hundred yards away, jump their ponies over the first strip, stop short of the second, and get back to the starting place as quickly as possible. The Indians give great attention to racing. In contests with American horses the small, wiry pony wins in a race of a fewr hundred yards, but for a mile or two the long stride of the horse makes him winner. In races of more than three miles the endurance of the pony again turns the scale in his favor.