"Tell your friends and relations," said the Piegan, "that you have had a dream, and that they must move into the brush yonder. Have them stay there with you, and they will not be hurt. I am going now to get my people."
It was very late in the night. Most of the Snakes were in bed and asleep. All at once the camp was surrounded with warriors, shouting the war cry and shooting, stabbing, and knocking people on the head as fast as they came out of the lodges.
That Piegan woman cried out: "Don't hurt me. I am a Piegan. Are any of my people here?"
"Many of your relations are here," some one said. "They will protect you."
Some young men seized and tied her, as her husband had said to do. They had hard work to keep her mother from killing her. "_Hai yah_!" the old woman cried. "There is my Snake woman daughter. Let me split her head open."
The fight was soon over. The Piegans killed the people almost as fast as they came out of their lodges. Some few escaped in the darkness. When the fight was over, the young warriors gathered up a great pile of lodge poles and brush, and set fire to it. Then the poor man tore the dress off his bad wife, tied the scalp of her dead Snake man around her neck, and told her to dance the scalp dance in the fire. She cried and hung back, calling out for pity. The people only laughed and pushed her into the fire. She would run through it, and then those on the other side would push her back. So they kept her running through the fire, until she fell down and died.
The old Snake woman had come out of the brush with her relations. Because she had been so good, the Piegans gave her, and those with her, one-half of all the horses and valuable things they had taken. "_Kyi!_" said the Piegan chief. "That is all for you, because you helped this poor man. To-morrow morning we start back North. If your heart is that way, go too and live with us." So these Snakes joined the Piegans and lived with them until they died, and their children married with the Piegans, and at last they were no longer Snake people.[1]
[Footnote 1: When the Hudson's Bay Company first established a fort at Edmonton, a daughter of one of these Snakes married a white employee of the company, named, in Blackfoot, _O-wai_, Egg.]