“So we all rambled down to the camp as neighbourly 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 string 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 the 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 footballs 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 clock 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 enamoured with that plan, for it shows John Tom is uneasy in his composures, and that leads to fire-water, and sometimes to the green corn dance and costs. Not often does Chief Wish-Heap-Dough get busy with the fire-water, but whenever he does there is heap much doing in the lodges of the palefaces who wear blue and carry the club.

“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 fire-water.

“ ‘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