Two hundred stolen horses were under the wild herdsmen, and any who liked the meat of the spotted buffalo might kill it close to camp from the scores taken out of the first caravans up the Platte that year--the Mormons and other early trailers whom the Sioux despised because their horses were so few.
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.