of, by the way you are acting. I think you had better let him go.” Then he took me out and told me that he would put him in the store-house and keep him there all night, and let him out in the morning. He then took him and locked him up. I told his mother what he had said. The next morning all Egan’s and Oytes’ men came to have a talk with him. Egan said,—
“My children are dying with hunger. I want what I and my people have worked for; that is, we want the wheat. We ask for nothing else, but our agent Parrish told us that would be ours.”
The agent said, “Nothing here is yours. It is all the government’s. If Parrish told you so, he told you lies.”
I spoke up and said: “Mr. Reinhard, why did not you tell me right before him when he was telling you about my wheat? If you had then said it did not belong to us, I would not have told my people about it. I told them, for they asked me if Mr. Parrish said anything about our grain.”
“Why, if you take the government wheat, you rob the government,” he said.
I said, “I don’t want to rob anybody.”
Jarry, my cousin, was against us, and said we ought to be ashamed to talk about anything that did not belong to us.
Then Egan got up and said to me, “I want you to tell everything I say to this man.”
I did as he said.
“Did the government tell you to come here and drive us off this reservation? Did the Big Father say, go and kill us all off, so you can have our land? Did he tell you to pull our children’s ears off, and put handcuffs on them, and carry a pistol to shoot us with? We want to know how the government came by this land. Is the government
