“O wisest Chief but one in this Tribe, that’s all right enough, but you know that no warrior can join us without first showing that he’s good stuff and clear grit, all wool, and a cut above the average somehow.  It hain’t never been so.  Now he’s got to lick some Warrior of the Tribe.  Kin you do that?”

“Nope.”

“Or outrun one or outshoot him or something—­or give us all a present.  What kin you do?”

“I kin steal watermillyons, an’ I kin see farder ’n any boy in school, an’ I kin sneak to beat all creation.  I watched you fellers lots of times from them bushes.  I watched you buildin’ that thar dam. I swum in it ‘fore you did, an’ I uster set an’ smoke in your teepee when you wasn’t thar, an’ I heerd you talk the time you was fixin’ up to steal our Birch bark.”

“Don’t seem to me like it all proves much fortitude.  Have you got any presents for the oldest head Chief of the tribe?”

“I’ll get you all the Birch bark you want.  I can’t git what you cut, coz me an’ Paw burned that so you couldn’t git it, but I’ll git you lots more, an’ maybe—­I’ll steal you a chicken once in awhile.”

“His intentions are evidently honourable Let’s take him in on sufferance,” said Yan.

“All right,” replied the head Chief, “he kin come in, but that don’t spile my claim to that left half of his scalp down to that tuft of yellow moss on the scruff of his neck where the collar has wore off the dirt.  I’m liable to call for it any time, an’ the ear goes with it.”

Guy wanted to treat this as a joke, but Sam’s glittering eyes and inscrutable face were centered hungrily on that “yaller tuft” in a way that gave him the “creeps” again.

“Say, Yan—­I mean Great Little Beaver—­you know all about it, what kind o’ stunts did they have to do to get into an Injun tribe, anyhow?”

“Different tribes do different ways, but the Sun Dance and the Fire Test are the most respectable and both terribly hard.”

“Well, what did you do?” queried the Great Woodpecker.

“Both,” said Yan grinning, as he remembered his sunburnt arms and shoulders.

“Quite sure?” said the older Chief in a tone of doubt.

“Yes, sir; and I bore it so well that every one there agreed that I was the best one in the Tribe,” said Little Beaver, omitting to mention the fact that he was the only one in it.  “I was unanimously named ‘Howling Sunrise.’”

“Well, I want to be ‘Howling Sunrise,’” piped Guy in his shrill voice.

“You?  You don’t know whether you can pass at all, you Yaller Mossback.”

“Come, Mossy, which will you do?”

Guy’s choice was to be sunburnt to the waist.  He was burnt and freckled already to the shoulders, on arms as well as on neck, and his miserable cotton shirt so barely turned the sun’s rays that he was elsewhere of a deep yellow tinge with an occasional constellation of freckles.  Accordingly he danced about camp all one day with nothing on but his pants, and, of course, being so seasoned, he did not burn.