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Page 22
"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.
"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?'
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