I tried to get pa to let the police go and drive them off, but he said he hadn’t no time to go and wake up the police, and they wouldn’t get around anyway before the middle of the week.  So pa took a tent stake and started for the green corn roast.  The Indians were taking turns dancing and eating roasted corn, and they had a barrel of beer, and I knew enough about Indians to keep away from them when they mix beer with green corn, for it has about the same effect as committing suicide with carbolic acid.

Pa put his hat on one side of his head and went right into the midst of the Indians, and grabbed a chief called “One Ear at a Time,” and hit him with the tent stake, and knocked him down, and said, “Now, you git.”  Well, sir, that Indian had no more than struck the fire in a sitting position, and filled the air with the odor of fried buckskin, before the whole tribe jumped on pa, and they kicked him with their moccasins, and were going to murder him, while the chief who acted as the burnt offering got out of the fire, and sat down in the cold mud to cool himself.  He held up his hand as a signal of attention, and he called a council of war, while the squaws sat on pa to hold him down.

The council of war sentenced pa to be burned at the stake, and they tied him to a tree and began to pile sticks around him, and pa told me to go to the circus lot and give an alarm, and send the hands to rescue him.  Gee, but didn’t I run though, and yell an alarm big enough for a massacre.  I told the hands, who were sleeping under the seats, or playing cards on the trunks that the Indians were burning pa at the stake, and some of the hands said that would serve him right, and the fellows that were playing cards said they didn’t want to break up the game when they were losers, to rescue no baldheaded curmudgeon.  I thought pa was a goner, sure, ’cause I could hear the Indians yell, and I thought I could smell flesh burning.  Oh, but I was scared for fear they would burn pa alive.

[Illustration:  The Indians Tied Pa to a Tree and Began to Pile Sticks Around Him.]

Just then the man who had charge of our cannibals, who each had a dog that they were looking for a place to roast, came along and I told him about the Indians’ corn roast, and he ordered the cannibals to go drive the Indians away from their fire and roast their dogs.  Well, it worked like a charm, and the cannibals made a rush for the Indians and drove them away just as they had lighted the fire around pa, and we were not a minute too soon.  After the Indians had skedaddled for the woods, and we cut the cords that bound pa, the cannibals went to work and skun the dogs, and began to cook them, and pa looked on, until it made him squirmish, but he was so tickled at being saved from the Indians, that he tried to be a good fellow with the cannibals.  I guess it would have been all right, only the cannibals got to drinking the Philadelphia beer, and then it was all off, cause roast dog wasn’t good enough for them, and they wanted to roast pa.