FullReads

“At half-past nine Professor Binkly is rolled in his quilt snoring in blank verse, and I am sitting by the fire listening to the frogs. Mr. Little Bear slides into camp and sits down against a tree. There is no symptoms of firewater.

“‘Jeff,’ says he, after a long time, ‘a little boy came West to hunt Indians.’

“‘Well, then?’ says I, for I wasn’t thinking as he was.

“‘And he bagged one,’ says John Tom, ‘and ’twas not with a gun, and he never had on a velveteen suit of clothes in his life.’ And then I began to catch his smoke.

“‘I know it,’ says I. ‘And I’ll bet you his pictures are on valentines, and fool men are his game, red and white.

“‘You win on the red,’ says John Tom, calm. ‘Jeff, for how many ponies do you think I could buy Mrs. Conyers?’

“‘Scandalous talk!’ I replies. ”Tis not a paleface custom.’ John Tom laughs loud and bites into a cigar. ‘No,’ he answers; ”tis the savage equivalent for the dollars of the white man’s marriage settlement. Oh, I know. There’s an eternal wall between the races. If I could do it, Jeff, I’d put a torch to every white college that a redman has ever set foot inside. Why don’t you leave us alone,’ he says, ‘to our own ghost-dances and dog-feasts, and our dingy squaws to cook our grasshopper soup and darn our moccasins?’

“‘Now, you sure don’t mean disrespect to the perennial blossom entitled education?’ says I, scandalized, ‘because I wear it in the bosom of my own intellectual shirt-waist. I’ve had education,’ says I, ‘and never took any harm from it.’

“‘You lasso us,’ goes on Little Bear, not noticing my prose insertions, ‘and teach us what is beautiful in literature and in life, and how to appreciate what is fine in men and women. What have you done to me?’ says he. ‘You’ve made me a Cherokee Moses. You’ve taught me to hate the wigwams and love the white man’s ways. I can look over into the promised land and see Mrs. Conyers, but my place is–on the reservation.’

“Little Bear stands up in his chief’s dress, and laughs again. ‘But, white man Jeff,’ he goes on, ‘the paleface provides a recourse. ‘Tis a temporary one, but it gives a respite and the name of it is whiskey.’ And straight off he walks up the path to town again. ‘Now,’ says I in my mind, ‘may the Manitou move him to do only bailable things this night!’ For I perceive that John Tom is about to avail himself of the white man’s solace.

“Maybe it was 10:30, as I sat smoking, when I hear pit-a-pats on the path, and here comes Mrs. Conyers running, her hair twisted up any way, and a look on her face that says burglars and mice and the flour’s-all-out rolled in one. ‘Oh, Mr. Peters,’ she calls out, as they will, ‘oh, oh!’ I made a quick think, and I spoke the gist of it out loud. ‘Now,’ says I, ‘we’ve been brothers, me and that Indian, but I’ll make a good one of him in two minutes if–‘

“‘No, no, she says, wild and cracking her knuckles, ‘I haven’t seen Mr. Little Bear. ‘Tis my–husband. He’s stolen my boy. Oh,’ she says, ‘just when I had him back in my arms again! That heartless villain! Every bitterness life knows,’ she says, ‘he’s made me drink. My poor little lamb, that ought to be warm in his bed, carried of by that fiend!’

“‘How did all this happen?’ I ask. ‘Let’s have the facts.’

“‘I was fixing his bed,’ she explains, ‘and Roy was playing on the hotel porch and he drives up to the steps. I heard Roy scream, and ran out. My husband had him in the buggy then. I begged him for my child. This is what he gave me.’ She turns her face to the light. There is a crimson streak running across her cheek and mouth. ‘He did that with his whip,’ she says.