O. Henry

               The Atavism of John Tom Little Bear


Файл с книжной полки Несененко Алексея
OCR: Несененко Алексей июнь 2002



[0. Henry thought this the best of the Jeff Peters stories, all the 
rest of which are included in The Gentle drafter, except 'Cupid a la 
Carte' in the Heart of the West.]

I SAW A LIGHT in Jeff Peters's room over the Red Front Drug Store. I 
hastened toward it, for I had not known that Jeff was in town. He is a 
man of the Hadji breed, of a hundred occupations, with a story to tell 
(when he will) of each one.
   I found Jeff re-pacldng his grip for a run down to Florida to look 
at an orange grove for which he had traded, a month before, his mining 
claim on the Yukon. He kicked me a chair, with the same old humorous, 
profound smile on his seasoned countenance. It had been eight months 
since we had met, but his greeting was such as men pass from day to 
day. Time is Jeff's servant, and the continent is a big lot across 
which he cuts to his many roads.
   For a while we skirmished along the edges of unprofitable talk 
which culminated in that unquiet problem of the Philippines.
   'All them tropical races,' said Jeff, 'could be run out better with 
their own jockeys up. The tropical man knows what he wants. All he 
wants is a season ticket to the cock-fights and a pair of Western 
Union climbers to go up the bread-fruit tree. The Anglo-Saxon man 
wants him to leam to conjugate and wear suspenders. He'll be happiest 
in his own way.'
   I was shocked.
   'Education, man,' I said, 'is the watchword. In time they will rise 
to our standard of civilization. Look at what education has done for 
the Indian.'
   '0-ho!' sang Jeff, lighting his pipe (which was a good sign). 'Yes, 
the Indian! I'm looking. I hasten to contemplate the redman as a 
standardbearer of progress. He's the same as the other brown boys. You 
can't make an Anglo-Saxon of him. Did I ever tell you about the time 
my friend John Tom Little Bear bit off the right ear of the arts of 
culture and education and spun the teetotum back round to where it was 
when Columbus was a little boy? I did not?
   'John Tom Little Bear was an educated Cherokee Indian and an old 
friend of mine when I was in the Territories. He was a graduate of one 
of them Eastern football colleges that have been so successful in 
teaching the Indian to use the gridiron instead of burning his victims 
at the stake. As an Anglo-Saxon, John Tom was copper-coloured in 
spots. As an Indian, he was one of the whitest men I ever knew. As a 
Cherokee, he was a gentleman, on the first ballot. As a ward of the 
nation he was mighty hard to carry at the primaries.
   'John Tom and me got together and began to make medicine -how to 
get up some lawful, genteel swindle which we might work in a quiet way 
so as not to excite the stupidity of the police or the cupidity of the 
larger corporations. We had close upon $500 between us, and we pined 
to make it grow, as all respectable capitalists do.
   'So we figured out a proposition which seems to be as honourable as 
a gold mine prospectus and as profitable as a church raffle. And 
inside of thirty days you find us swarming into Kansas with a pair of 
fluent horses and a red camping-wagon on the European plan. John Tom 
is Chief Wish-Heap-Dough, the famous Indian medicine man and Samaritan 
Sachem of the Seven Tribes. Mr. Peters is business manager and half 
owner. We needed a third man, so we looked around and found J. 
Conyngham Binkly leaning against the want column of a newspaper. This 
Binldy has a disease for Shakespearean roles, and an hallucination 
about a 200 nights' run on the New York stage. But he confesses that 
he never could earn the butter to spread on his William S. roles, so 
he is willing to drop to the ordinary baker's kind, and be satisfied 
with a 200-mile run behind the medicine ponies. Besides Richard in, he 
could do twenty-seven coon songs and banjo specialties, and was 
willing to cook, and curry the horses. We carried a fine line of 
excuses for taking money. One was a magic soap for removing grease 
spots and quarters from clothes. One was a Sum-wah-tah, the great 
Indian Remedy made from a prairie herb revealed by the Great Spirit in 
a dream to his favourite medicine men, the great chiefs MacGarrity and 
Silberstein, bottlers, Chicago. And the other was a frivolous system 
of pick-pocketing the Kansasters that had the department stores 
reduced to a decimal fraction. Look ye! A pair of silk garters, a 
dream book, one dozen clothes-pins, a gold tooth, and "When Knighthood 
Was in Flower" all wrapped up in a genuine Japanese silkarina 
handkerchief and handed to the handsome lady by Mr. Peters for the 
trivial sum of fifty cents, while Professor Binkly entertains us in a 
three-minute round with the banjo.
   ''Twas an eminent graft we had. We ravaged peacefully through the 
State, determined to remove all doubt as to why 'twas called bleeding 
Kansas. John Tom Little Bear, in full Indian chiefs costume, drew 
crowds away from the parchesi sociables and government ownership 
conversaziones. While at the football college in the East he had 
acquired quantities of rhetoric and the art of calisthenics and 
sophistry in his classes, and when he stood up in the red wagon and 
explained to the farmers, eloquent, about chilblains and 
hyperaesthesia of the cranium, Jeff couldn't hand out the Indian 
Remedy fast enough for 'em.
   'One night we was camped on the edge of a little town out west of 
Salina. We always camped near a stream, and put up a little tent. 
Sometimes we sold out of the Remedy unexpected, and then Chief Wish-
Heap-Dough would have a dream in which the Manitou commanded him to 
fill up a few bottles of Sum-wah-tah at the most convenient place. 
Twas about ten o'clock, and we'd just got in from a street 
performance. I was in the tent with the lantern, figuring up the day's 
profits. John Tom hadn't taken of his Indian make-up, and was sitting 
by the camp-fire minding a fine sirloin steak in the pan for the 
Professor till he finished his hair-raising scene with the trained 
horses.
   'All at once out of dark bushes comes a pop like a fire-cracker, 
and John Tom gives a grunt and digs out of his bosom a little bullet 
that has dented itself against his collar-bone. John Tom makes a dive 
in the direction of the fireworks, and comes back dragging by the 
collar a kid about nine or ten years young, in a velveteen suit, with 
a little nickel-mounted rifle in his hand about as big as a fountain-
pen.
   '"Here, you pappoose," says John Tom, "what are you gunning for 
with that howitzer? You might hit somebody in the eye. Come out, Jeff, 
and mind the steak. Don't let it bum, while I investigate this demon 
with the pea-shooter."
   '"Cowardly redskin," says the kid like he was quoting from a 
favourite author. "Dare to bum me at the stake and the paleface will 
sweep you from the prairies like - like everything. Now, you lemme go, 
or I'll tell mamma."
   'John Tom plants the kid on a camp-stool, and sits down by him. 
"Now, tell the big chief," he says, "why you try to shoot pellets into 
your Uncle John's system. Didn't you know it was loaded?"
   '"Are you a Indian?" asks the kid, looking up, cute as you please, 
at John Tom's buckskin and eagle feathers. "I am," says John Tom.
   '"Well, then, that's why," answers the boy, swinging his feet. I 
nearly let the steak bum watching the nerve of that youngster.
   '"0-ho!" says John Tom, "I see. You're the Boy Avenger. And you've 
sworn to rid the continent of the savage redman. Is that about the way 
of it, son?"
   'The kid half-way nodded his head. And then he looked glum. Twas 
indecent to wring his secret from his bosom before a single brave had 
fallen before his parlour-rifle.
   '"Now, tell us where your wigwam is, pappoose," says John Tom - 
"where you live? Your mamma will be worrying about you being out so 
late. Tell me, and I'll take you home."
   'The kid grins. "I guess not," he says. "I live thousands and 
thousands of miles over there." He gyrated his hand toward the 
horizon. "I come on the train," he says, "by myself. I got off here 
because the conductor said my ticket had ex-pirated." He looks at John 
Tom with sudden suspicion. "I bet you ain't a Indian," he says. "You 
don't talk like a Indian. You look like one, but all a Indian can say 
is 'heap good' and 'paleface die.' Say, I bet you are one of them 
make-believe Indians that sell medicine on the streets. I saw one once 
in Quincy."
   '"You never mind," says John Tom, "whether I'm a cigar-sign or a 
Tammany cartoon. The question before the council is what's to be done 
with you. You've run away from home. You've been reading Howells. 
You've disgraced the profession of boy avengers by trying to shoot a 
tame Indian, and never saying: 'Die, dog of a redskin! You have 
crossed the path of the Boy Avenger nineteen times too often.' What do 
you mean by it?"
   'The kid thought for a minute. T guess I made a mistake," he says. 
"I ought to have gone farmer west. They find 'em wild out there in the 
canons." He holds out his hand to John Tom, the little rascal. "Please 
excuse me, sir," says he, "for shooting at you. I hope it didn't hurt 
you. But you ought to be more careful. When a scout sees a Indian in 
his war-dress, his rifle must speak." Little Bear give a big laugh 
with a whoop at the end of it, and swings the kid ten feet high and 
sets him on his shoulder, and the runaway fingers the fringe and the 
eagle feathers and is full of the joy the white man knows when he 
dangles his heels against an inferior race. It is plain that Little 
Bear and that kid are chums from that on. The little renegade has 
already smoked the pipe of peace with the savage; and you can see in 
his eye that he is figuring on a tomahawk and a pair of moccasins, 
children s size.
   'We have supper in the tent. The youngster looks upon me and the 
Professor as ordinary braves, only intended as a background to the 
camp scene. When he is seated on a box of Sum-wah-tah, with the edge 
of the table sawing his neck, and his mouth full of beefsteak, Little 
Bear calls for his name. "Roy," says the kid, with a sir-loiny sound 
to it. But when the rest of it and his post-office address is referred 
to, he shakes his head. "I guess not," he says. "You'll send me back. 
I want to stay with you. I like this camping out. At home, we fellows 
had a camp in our back yard. They called me Roy, the Red Wolf. I guess 
that'll do for a name. Gimme another piece of beefsteak, please."
   'We had to keep that kid. We knew there was a hullabaloo about him 
somewheres, and that Mamma, and Uncle Harry, and Aunt Jane, and the 
Chief of Police were hot after finding his trail, but not another word 
would he tell us. In two days he was the mascot of Big Medicine 
outfit, and all of us had a sneaking hope that his owners wouldn't 
turn up. When the red wagon was doing business he was in it, and 
passed up the bottles to Mr. Peters as proud and satisfied as a prince 
that s abjured a two-hundred-dollar crown for a million-dollar 
parvenuess. Once John Tom asked him something about his papa. "I ain't 
got any papa," he says. "He runned away and left us. He made my mamma 
cry. Aunt Lucy says he's a shape." "A what?" somebody asks him. "A 
shape," says the kid: "some kind of a shape - lemme see - oh, yes, a 
feendenuman shape. I don't know what it means." John Tom was for 
putting our brand on him, and dressing him up like a little chief, 
with wampun and beads, but I vetoes it. "Somebody's lost that kid, is 
my view of it, and they may want him. You let me try him with a few 
stratagems, and see if I can't get a look at his visiting-card."
   'So that night I goes up to Mr. Roy Blank by the camp-fire, and 
looks at him contemptuous and scornful. "Snickenwitzel!" says I, like 
the word made me sick; "Snickenwitzel! Bah! Before I'd be named 
Snickenwitzel!"
   '"What's the matter with you, Jeff?" says the kid, opening his eyes 
wide.
   '"Snickenwitzel!" I repeats, and I spat the word out. "I saw a man 
to-day from your town, and he told me your name. I'm not surprised you 
was ashamed to tell it. Snickenwitzel! Whew!"
   '"Ah, here, now," says the boy, indignant and wriggling all over, 
"what's the matter with you? That ain't my name. It's Conyers. What's 
the matter with you?"
   '"And that's not the worst of it," I went on quick, keeping him hot 
and not giving him time to think. "We thought you was from a nice, 
well-to-do family. Here's Mr. Little Bear, a chief of the Cherokees, 
entitled to wear nine otter tails on his Sunday blanket, and Professor 
Binkly, who plays Shakespeare and the banjo, and me, that's got 
hundreds of dollars in that black tin box in the wagon, and we've got 
to be careful about the company we keep. That man tells me your folks 
live 'way down in little Hencoop Alley, where there are no sidewalks, 
and the goats eat off the table with you."
   'That kid was almost crying now. " Tain't so," he splutters. "He - 
he don't know what he's talking about. We live on Poplar Av'noo. I 
don't 'sociate with goats. What's the matter with you?"
   '"Poplar Avenue," says I, sarcastic. "Poplar Avenue! That's a 
street to live on! It only runs two blocks and then falls off a bluff. 
You can throw a keg of nails the whole length of it. Don't talk to me 
about Poplar Avenue."
   '"It's - it's miles long," says the kid. "Our number's 862 and 
there's lots of houses after that. What's the matter with - aw, you 
make me tired, Jeff."
   '"Well, well, now," says I. "I guess that man made a mistake. Maybe 
it was some other boy he was talking about. If I catch him I'll teach 
him to go around slandering people." And after supper I goes up-town 
and telegraphs to Mrs. Conyers, 862 Poplar Avenue, Quincy, Dl., that 
the kid is safe and sassy with us, and will be held for further 
orders. In two hours an answer comes to hold him tight, and she'll 
start for him by next train.
   'The next train was due at 6 p.m. the next day, and me and John Tom 
was at the depot with the kid. You might scour the plains in vain for 
the big Chief Wish-Heap-Dough. In his place is Mr. Little Bear in the 
human habiliments of the Anglo-Saxon sect; and the leather of his 
shoes is patented and the loop of his necktie is copyrighted. For 
these things John Tom had grafted on him at college along with 
metaphysics and the knock-out guard for the low tackle. But for his 
complexion, which is some yellowish, and the black mop of his straight 
hair, you might have thought here was an ordinary man out of the dty 
directory that subscribes for magazines and pushes the lawn-mower in 
his shirt-sleeves of evenings.
   'Then the train rolled in, and a little woman in a grey dress, with 
a sort of illuminating hair, slides off and looks around quick. And 
the Boy Avenger sees her, and yells "Mamma," and she cries "Oh!" and 
they meet in a clinch, and now the pesky redskins can come forth from 
their caves on the plains without fear any more of the rifle of Roy, 
the Red Wolf. Mrs. Conyers comes up and thanks me an' John Tom without 
the usual extremities you always look for in a woman. She says just 
enough, in a way to convince, and there is no incidental music by the 
orchestra. I made a few illiterate requisitions upon the art of 
conversation, at which the lady smiles friendly, as if she had known 
me a week. And then Mr. Little Bear adorns the atmosphere with the 
various idioms into which education can fracture the wind of speech. I 
could see the kid's mother didn't quite place John Tom; but it seemed 
she was apprised in his dialects, and she played up to his lead in the 
science of making three words do the work of one
   '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 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 that supper, for then was when Mr. Little Bear made 
an intellectual balloon ascension. I held on to the table-cloth, 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 
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 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 die 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," says 
he, "to our own ghost-dances and dog-feasts, and our dingy squaws to 
cook our grasshopper soup and dam 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 chiefs 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 whisky."
   '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 off 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.
   '"Come back to the hotel," says I, "and we'll see what can be 
done."
   'On the way she tells me some of the wherefores. When he slashed 
her with the whip he told her he found out she was coming for the kid, 
and he was on the same train. Mrs. Conyers had been living with her 
brother, and they'd watched the boy always, as her husband had tried 
to steal him before. I judge that man was worse than a street railway 
promoter. It seems he had spent her money and slugged her and killed 
her canary bird, and told it around that she had cold feet.
   'At the hotel we found a mass meeting of five infuriated citizens 
chewing tobacco and denouncing the outrage. Most of the town was 
asleep by ten o'clock. I talks the lady some quiet, and tells her I 
will take the one o'clock train for the next town, forty miles east, 
for it is likely that the esteemed Mr. Conyers will drive there to 
take the cars. "I don't know," I tells her, "but what he has legal 
rights; but if I find him I can give him an illegal left in the eye, 
and tie him up for a day or two, anyhow, on a disturbal of the peace 
proposition."
    'Mrs. Conyers goes inside and cries with the landlord's wife, who 
is fixing some catnip tea that will make everything all right for the 
poor dear. The landlord comes out on the porch, thumbing his one 
suspender, and says to me:
   '"Ain't had so much excitements in town since Bedford Steegall's 
wife swallered a spring lizard. I seen him through the winder hit her 
with the buggy whip, and everything. What's that suit of clothes cost 
you you got on? 'Pears like we'd have some rain, don't it? Say, doc, 
that Indian ofyom's on a kind of a whizz to-night, ain't he? He comes 
along just before you did, and I told him about this here occurrence. 
He gives a cur'us kind of a hoot, and trotted off. I guess our 
constable '11 have him in the lock-up 'fore morning."
   'I thought I'd sit on the porch and wait for the one o'clock train. 
I wasn't feeling saturated with mirth. Here was John Tom on one of his 
sprees, and this kidnapping business losing sleep for me. But then, 
I'm always having trouble with other people's troubles.
Every few minutes Mrs. Conyers would come out on the porch and look 
down the road the way the buggy went, like she expected to see that 
kid coming back on a white pony with a red apple in his hand. Now, 
wasn't that like a woman? And that brings up cats. "I saw a mouse go 
in this hole," says Mrs. Cat; "you can go prize up a plank over there 
if you like; I'll watch this hole."
   '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 half-way 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. Fire-water 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 colour. "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 eye again.
   '"What was it, Jeff?" he asks.
   '"Heap fire-water," 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 bromoseltzer, and then he'll take up the redman's 
burden again." '