by O. Henry
“ ‘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 burn, while I investigate this demon with the pea-shooter.’
“ ‘Cowardly redskin,’ says the kid, like he was quoting from a favorite author. ‘Dare to burn 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 burn watching the nerve of that youngster.
“ ‘O-ho!’ says John Tom, ‘I see. You’re the Boy Avenger. And you’ve sworn to rid the continent of the savage Red Man. 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 parlor-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. ‘I guess I made a mistake,’ he says. ‘I ought to have gone farther west. They find ’em wild out there in the cañons.’ 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 sirloiny 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 hallabaloo 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 the 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 wampum 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 old Hencoop Alley, where there’s 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.’
“ ‘Aw, 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 uptown and telegraphs to Mrs. Conyers, 862 Poplar Avenue, Quincy, Ill., 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 has had grafted on him at college along with metaphysics and the knockout 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 city directory that subscribes for Harper’s Weekly and pushes the lawn-mower in his shirt-sleeves of evenings.
“Then the train rolled in, and a little woman in a gray dress, with 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 and 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 ramble 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 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 tablecloth, and listened to him soar. That Red Man, 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 ideas. 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 home. Me and Little Bear left at eight o’clock, and sold Indian Remedy on the court-house 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 red man 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 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 shirtwaist. 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 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 into 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,’ I says, ‘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. C. will drive there to take the cars. ‘I don’t know,’ I tell 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’d that suit of clothes cost you got on? ’Pears like we’d have some rain, don’t it? Say, doc, that Indian of yourn’s on a kind of a whizz to-night, ain’t he? He come along just before you did, and I told him about this here occurrence. He give a cur’us kind of a hoot, and trotted off. I guess our constable’ll have him in the lock-up ’fore morning.’