It was drawing on toward sunset, so I slipped into my camera strap and descended the slope.  I paused, however, while still some distance away from my tent, for next to it another had been erected during my absence.  It was a tiny affair with a rug in front of it, and upon the rug stood a steamer-chair.

“Hello, inside!” I shouted, then ran forward, straddling papooses and shouldering squaws out of my way.

“Hello!” came an answer, and out through the flap was thrust the head of my friend, the Government doctor.

“Gee!  I’m glad to see you!” I said as I shook his hand.  “I’m as lonesome as a deaf mute at a song recital.”

“I figured you would be,” said the doctor, “so I came out to see the finish of the feast and to visit with you.  I brought some bread from the Agency.”

“Hoorah!  White bread and white conversation!  I’m hungry for both.”

“What’s the matter?  Won’t the Indians talk to you?”

“I guess they would if they could, but they can’t.  I haven’t found one among the whole five thousand who can understand a word I say.  Your Government schools have gone back in the betting with me, Doc.  You must keep your graduates under lock and key.”

“They can all speak English if they want to—­that is, the younger ones.  Some few of the old people are too proud to try, but the others can talk as well as we can, until they forget.”

“Do you mean to say these people have been fooling me?  I don’t believe it,” said I.  “There’s one that can’t talk English, and I’ll make a bet on it.”  I indicated a passing brave with an eagle-feather head-dress which reached far down his naked legs.  He was a magnificent animal; he was young and lithe, and as tall and straight as a sapling.  “I’ve tried him twice, and he simply doesn’t understand.”

My friend called to the warrior:  “Hey, Tom!  Come here a minute.”  The Indian came, and the doctor continued, “When do you hold the horse-races, Thomas?”

“To-morrow, at four o’clock, unless it rains,” said the fellow.  He spoke in an odd, halting dialect, but his words were perfectly understandable.

“Are you going to ride?”

“No; my race-horse is sick.”

As the ocher-daubed figure vanished into the dusk the old man turned to me, saying, “College man.”

“What?”

“Yes.  B.A.  He’s a graduate.”

“Impossible!” I declared.  “Why, he talks like a foreigner, or as if he were just learning our language.”

“Exactly.  In another three years he’ll be an Indian again, through and through.  Oh, the reservation is full of fellows like Tom.”  The doctor heaved a sigh of genuine discouragement.  “It’s a melancholy acknowledgment to make, but our work seems to count for almost nothing.  It’s their blood.”

“Perhaps they forget the higher education,” said I; “but how about the Agency school, where you teach them to farm and to sew and to cook, as well as to read and to write?  Surely they don’t forget that?”