I opened my cigarette case to him.  Like his late critic, Pete availed himself of two, though he had not the excuse of a pipe to be filled.  One he coyly tucked above his left ear and one he lighted.  Then he sat gracefully back upon his heels and drew smoke into his innermost recesses, a shrunken little figure of a man in a calico shirt of gay stripes, faded blue overalls, and shoes that were remarkable as ruins.  With a pointed chip in the slender fingers of one lean brown hand—­a narrow hand of quite feminine delicacy—­he cleared the ground of other chips and drew small figures in the earth.

“Some of your people cut up in a fight down at Kulanche last night,” I remarked after a moment of courteous waiting.

“Mebbe,” said Pete, noncommittal.

“Were you down there?”

“I never kill a man with a knife,” said Pete; “that ain’t my belief.”

He left an opening that tempted, but I thought it wise to ignore that for the moment.

“You an old man, Pete?”

“Mebbe.”

“How old?”

“Oh, so-so.”

“You remember a long time ago—­how long?”

He drew a square in his cleared patch of earth, subdivided it into little squares, and dotted each of these in the centre before he spoke.

“When Modocs have big soldier fight.”

“You a Modoc?”

“B’lieve me!”

“When Captain Jack fought the soldiers over in the Lava Beds?”

“Some fight—­b’lieve me!” said Pete, erasing his square and starting a circle.

“You fight, too?”

“Too small; I do little odd jobs—­when big Injin kill soldier I skin um head.”

I begged for further items, but Pete seemed to feel that he had been already verbose.  He dismissed the historic action with a wise saying: 

“Killing soldiers all right; but it don’t settle nothing.”  He drew a triangle.

Indelicately then I pried into his spiritual life.

“You a Christian, Pete?”

“Injin-Christian,” he amended—­as one would say
“Progressive-Republican.”

“Believe in God?”

“Two.”  This was a guarded admission; I caught his side glance.

“Which ones?” I asked it cordially; and Pete smiled as one who detects a brother liberal in theology.

“Injin God; Christian God.  Injin God go like this—­” He brushed out his latest figure and drew a straight line a foot long.  And Christian God go so—­he drew a second straight line perpendicular to the first.  I was made to see the line of his own God extending over the earth some fifty feet above its surface, while the line of the Christian God went straight and endlessly into the heavens.  “Injin God stay close—­Christian God go straight up.  Whoosh!” He looked toward the zenith to indicate the vanishing line.  “I think mebbe both O.K.  You think both O.K.?”

“Mebbe,” I said.

Pete retraced the horizontal line of his own God and the perpendicular line of the other.