“My friend,” Barker told him, “wait till we reach Vicksburg. There you will see soldiers and guns.”
“Where do all the black people live?” he asked. “Do they live in the woods and come out to work in the fields of cotton that we have seen?
“If our young men could have seen all the soldiers and ships and guns and towns of the white people, they never would have made war against them.”
The second day on the boat was a Sunday and the pastry-cook did his best to furnish a wonderful collection of cakes, pies, and jellies.
Barker and the boys could not help being amused at the way Tatanka looked furtively at the sumptuous Sunday dinner. The variously colored jellies served in tall glasses, especially excited his-curiosity and suspicion.
“Is it medicine or is it to eat?” he whispered to Barker.
“It’s all to be eaten,” Barker informed him. “Don’t think again of bad medicine on this boat.”
“If the Sioux chiefs were here,” Tatanka remarked with a smile, “they would have to carry away many glasses of food, for it is the custom of the Indians to take away with them whatever they cannot eat at a feast.
“Captain Banks must be very rich to have so many dishes on his ship.”
The pilot of the _Grey Hawk_ did not know the river well enough to run after dark, so the passengers saw the whole distance by daylight.
At night a group of colored deck-hands appeared as minstrels for the entertainment of the passengers.
“The black men have big white teeth and big white eyes, and they can sing and dance,” Tatanka remarked, “but they couldn’t give the Sioux war-whoop.”
About the 20th of June the steamer tied up at Haynes Bluff on the Yazoo River.
Tatanka, who had wondered at the soldiers and ships at New Madrid, was here simply bewildered. Ships, teams, mule-teams, ox-teams, horse-teams, and soldiers and more soldiers everywhere; infantry, cavalry, and terrible artillery. Tatanka, with the observant eyes of an Indian scout, saw everything, but hardly spoke a word all day.
Grant had by this time about 70,000 men, an army about ten times as large as the whole Sioux nation. From Haynes Bluff southward his lines were stretched out and entrenched over a distance of fifteen miles.
Over hills, through ravines, through woods and cane-brakes ran the sheer endless line of rifle-pits, trenches, parapets, and batteries. And in front of the Union works, rose in grim defiance the lines and pits and batteries of the Confederates. The lines of the two armies ran about three miles east of Vicksburg over wooded hills which rise about two hundred feet above the river. For one month since the 19th of May the Confederate army under General John C. Pemberton and the city of Vicksburg had been besieged, by the Union army, while the Union fleets held the river above and below the city.