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Page 24
"About a quarter to one o'clock the lady comes out again, restless,
crying easy, as females do for their own amusement, and she looks down
that road again and listens. 'Now, ma'am,' says I, 'there's no use
watching cold wheel-tracks. By this time they're halfway to--' 'Hush,'
she says, holding up her hand. And I do hear something coming
`flip-flap' in the dark; and then there is the awfulest war-whoop ever
heard outside of Madison Square Garden at a Buffalo Bill matinee. And up
the steps and on to the porch jumps the disrespectable Indian. The lamp
in the hall shines on him, and I fail to recognize Mr. J. T. Little
Bear, alumnus of the class of '91. What I see is a Cherokee brave, and
the warpath is what he has been travelling. Firewater and other things
have got him going. His buckskin is hanging in strings, and his feathers
are mixed up like a frizzly hen's. The dust of miles is on his
moccasins, and the light in his eye is the kind the aborigines wear. But
in his arms he brings that kid, his eyes half closed, with his little
shoes dangling and one hand fast around the Indian's collar.
"'Pappoose!' says John Tom, and I notice that the flowers of the white
man's syntax have left his tongue. He is the original proposition in
bear's claws and copper color. 'Me bring,' says he, and he lays the kid
in his mother's arms. 'Run fifteen mile,' says John Tom--'Ugh! Catch
white man. Bring pappoose.'
"The little woman is in extremities of gladness. She must wake up that
stir-up trouble youngster and hug him and make proclamation that he is
his mamma's own precious treasure. I was about to ask questions, but I
looked at Mr. Little Bear, and my eye caught the sight of something in
his belt. 'Now go to bed, ma'am,' says I, 'and this gadabout youngster
likewise, for there's no more danger, and the kidnapping business is not
what it was earlier in the night.'
"I inveigled John Tom down to camp quick, and when he tumbled over
asleep I got that thing out of his belt and disposed of it where the eye
of education can't see it. For even the football colleges disapprove of
the art of scalp-taking in their curriculums.
"It is ten o'clock next day when John Tom wakes up and looks around. I
am glad to see the nineteenth century in his eyes again.
"'What was it, Jeff?" he asks.
"'Heap firewater,' says I.
"John Tom frowns, and thinks a little. 'Combined,' says he directly,
'with the interesting little physiological shake-up known as reversion
to type. I remember now. Have they gone yet?'
"'On the 7:30 train,' I answers.
"'Ugh!' says John Tom; 'better so. Paleface, bring big Chief
Wish-Heap-Dough a little bromo-seltzer, and then he'll take up the
redman's burden again.'"
HELPING THE OTHER FELLOW
[Originally published in Munsey's Magazine, December, 1908.]
"But can thim that helps others help thimselves!"
--Mulvaney.
This is the story that William Trotter told me on the beach at Aguas
Frescas while I waited for the gig of the captain of the fruit steamer
Andador which was to take me abroad. Reluctantly I was leaving the Land
of Always Afternoon. William was remaining, and he favored me with a
condensed oral autobiography as we sat on the sands in the shade cast by
the Bodega Nacional.
As usual, I became aware that the Man from Bombay had already written
the story; but as he had compressed it to an eight-word sentence, I have
become an expansionist, and have quoted his phrase above, with apologies
to him and best regards to Terence.
II
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