Although the Red Hawk and her cargo were a complete loss, all on board reached land safely. With the wreckage of the boat, the men built a fire to dry themselves and from a box of bread and bacon which the waves threw ashore, they made a frugal supper. The four travelers for the South had saved their guns and blankets and all spent the night near a big fire as best they could.

The next day, Tatanka built a tepee, using blankets and canvas instead of the deerskins and buffalo skins he had learned to use when he was a boy. The company was indeed much in need of some kind of shelter because little Tim was not at all himself. He tried bravely not to “lie down,” as he said, but his head ached, his face was flushed and at times he had a high fever.

“I fear the boy will be sick,” said Tatanka. “I will fix him a tea.”

Tim had the dislike of most small boys for medicine, but he drank down a large cupful of hot tea made by steeping some green plants in hot water. Then Tatanka covered him up with several blankets to produce sweating.

“It is good medicine,” the Indian remarked. “It is the way our women cure their children, and the missionaries also say it is good medicine.”

After a few days, the four travelers moved to a permanent camp a little way below the foot of Lake Pepin and about a mile below Reed’s Landing.

At this place were several stores, and the landing owed its existence to the fact that early in spring goods were delivered here and hauled by wagon to the head of the lake, where they were loaded on other steamers for shipment to St. Paul. For the ice sometimes remains in Lake Pepin two weeks longer than in any other part of the upper river.

Barker and Black Buffalo had intended to take the next boat to St. Louis, but Little Tim grew so sick that it was impossible to move him, and the men decided that they would have to take care of the sick boy as well as they could.

“He has the long fever,” declared Tatanka, “and he will be sick a long time. May be till the Mississippi freezes over.”

Tim did have a long sickness. He had no pain, he had no appetite, and his small body often burnt with a high fever.

If a doctor could have been consulted, he would have said that Tim had a fairly mild case of typhoid fever, but there was no doctor within fifty miles of Reed’s Landing. Barker and Tatanka had both seen cases like Tim’s and felt that in time the little fellow would get well again.

“We shall stay here till the Great River freezes over,” said Tatanka, after a week had passed. “A sick boy cannot travel.”

Tatanka built another tepee, which he and Bill occupied, while the trapper slept in the first tepee with the sick boy. The two men bought a boat of the trader and finished a canoe the trader had begun. They also built of logs and rough boards a shack for winter use, doing the work whenever they had plenty of time.
The two men bought a boat of the trader.
The two men bought a boat of the trader.

“A tepee,” Tatanka said, “is a good house in summer and fall, but in winter it is too cold for white people, who are not used to it.”

Both the trapper and Black Buffalo did all they could to make the sick boy comfortable. They gathered wild cherries and gave him the juice to drink; they made soup of prairie chicken, grouse, and wild duck.

“You must drink the good soup,” said Barker, “for when the lake freezes up you and Bill must go skating and you must be big and strong when we get home to Vicksburg.”

It was not difficult for the trapper and the Indian to secure enough food, for both of them knew how to gather the wild foods of woods, river, and marsh.

It was not getting to be the time when the great waves of bird life roll southward, and as the Mississippi and its grand winding bottoms are one of the great highways of the winged millions, there was an endless procession of flocks coming and going.

When little Tim had a good day and the weather was mild, the trapper carried the sick boy to a spot where he could see the shining river and the wooded bluffs, gorgeous in autumn colors, for no river in the world surpasses the upper Mississippi in the almost inconceivable profusion of autumn flowers and in the gorgeous effects of mixed and blended green, gold, orange, reds, and crimson, all painted on a canvas far too vast for any human artist and almost too grand for human eye to drink in.

And above all this beauty on earth, spread the blue sky, with fleecy white clouds floating eastward.

“Uncle Barker,” the boy would ask, “what are the birds almost touching the clouds?”

“I can hear their call,” the old trapper answered, glad that Tim was beginning to take an interest in things, “I think they are martins, the kind that nested in the hollow trees at Fort Ridgely and in the big house the soldiers had built for them.”

Near the tepees stood an immense hollow elm. Around this tree a small flock of............