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“That kid introduced us, with some footnotes and explanations that made things plainer than a week of rhetoric. He danced around, and punched us in the back, and tried to climb John Tom’s leg. ‘This is John Tom, mamma,’ says he. ‘He’s a Indian. He sells medicine in a red wagon. I shot him, but he wasn’t wild. The other one’s Jeff. He’s a fakir, too. Come on and see the camp where we live, won’t you, mamma?’

“It is plain to see that the life of the woman is in that boy. She has got him again where her arms can gather him, and that’s enough. She’s ready to do anything to please him. She hesitates the eighth of a second and takes another look at these men. I imagine she says to herself about John Tom, ‘Seems to be a gentleman, if his hair don’t curl.’ And Mr. Peters she disposes of as follows: ‘No ladies’ man, but a man who knows a lady.’

“So we all rambled down to the camp as neighborly as coming from a wake. And there she inspects the wagon and pats the place with her hand where the kid used to sleep, and dabs around her eyewinkers with her handkerchief. And Professor Binkly gives us ‘Trovatore’ on one strong of the banjo, and is about to slide off into Hamlet’s monologue when one of the horses gets tangled in his rope and he must go look after him, and says something about ‘foiled again.’

“When it got dark me and John Tom walked back up to the Corn Exchange Hotel, and the four of us had supper there. I think the trouble started at that supper, for then was when Mr. Little Bear made an intellectual balloon ascension. I held on to the tablecloth, and listened to him soar. That redman, if I could judge, had the gift of information. He took language, and did with it all a Roman can do with macaroni. His vocal remarks was all embroidered over with the most scholarly verbs and prefixes. And his syllables was smooth, and fitted nicely to the joints of his idea. I thought I’d heard him talk before, but I hadn’t. And it wasn’t the size of his words, but the way they come; and ’twasn’t his subjects, for he spoke of common things like cathedrals and football and poems and catarrh and souls and freight rates and sculpture. Mrs. Conyers understood his accents, and the elegant sounds went back and forth between ’em. And now and then Jefferson D. Peters would intervene a few shop-worn, senseless words to have the butter passed or another leg of the chicken.

“Yes, John Tom Little Bear appeared to be inveigled some in his bosom about that Mrs. Conyers. She was of the kind that pleases. She had the good looks and more, I’ll tell you. You take one of these cloak models in a big store. They strike you as being on the impersonal system. They are adapted for the eye. What they run to is inches around and complexion, and the art of fanning the delusion that the sealskin would look just as well on the lady with the warts and the pocket-book. Now, if one of them models was off duty, and you took it, and it would say ‘Charlie’ when you pressed it, and sit up at the table, why, then you would have something similar to Mrs. Conyers. I could see how John Tom could resist any inclination to hate that white squaw.

“The lady and the kid stayed at the hotel. In the morning, they say, they will start for home. Me and Little Bear left at eight o’clock, and sold Indian Remedy on the courthouse square till nine. He leaves me and the Professor to drive down to camp, while he stays up town. I am not enamored with that plan, for it shows John Tom is uneasy in his composures, and that leads to firewater, and sometimes to the green corn dance and costs. Not often does Chief Wish-Heap-Dough get busy with the firewater, but whenever he does there is heap much doing in the lodges of the palefaces who wear blue and carry the club.