“Well, they ain’t so bad.  I like ’em better than most foreigners that have come over in the last few hundred years.  One thing about the Indian is this:  when he mixes with the white race he swaps all his own vices for them of the pale-faces—­and he retains all his own virtues.  Well, his virtues are enough to call out the reserves whenever he lets ’em loose.  But the imported foreigners adopt our virtues and keep their own vices—­and it’s going to take our whole standing army some day to police that gang.

“But let me tell you about the trip I took to Mexico with High Jack Snakefeeder, a Cherokee twice removed, a graduate of a Pennsylvania college and the latest thing in pointed-toed, rubber-heeled, patent kid moccasins and Madras hunting-shirt with turned-back cuffs.  He was a friend of mine.  I met him in Tahlequah when I was out there during the land boom, and we got thick.  He had got all there was out of colleges and had come back to lead his people out of Egypt.  He was a man of first-class style and wrote essays, and had been invited to visit rich guys’ houses in Boston and such places.

“There was a Cherokee girl in Muscogee that High Jack was foolish about.  He took me to see her a few times.  Her name was Florence Blue Feather—­but you want to clear your mind of all ideas of squaws with nose-rings and army blankets.  This young lady was whiter than you are, and better educated than I ever was.  You couldn’t have told her from any of the girls shopping in the swell Third Avenue stores.  I liked her so well that I got to calling on her now and then when High Jack wasn’t along, which is the way of friends in such matters.  She was educated at the Muscogee College, and was making a specialty of—­let’s see—­eth—­yes, ethnology.  That’s the art that goes back and traces the descent of different races of people, leading up from jelly-fish through monkeys and to the O’Briens.  High Jack had took up that line too, and had read papers about it before all kinds of riotous assemblies—­Chautauquas and Choctaws and chowder-parties, and such.  Having a mutual taste for musty information like that was what made ’em like each other, I suppose.  But I don’t know!  What they call congeniality of tastes ain’t always it.  Now, when Miss Blue Feather and me was talking together, I listened to her affidavits about the first families of the Land of Nod being cousins german (well, if the Germans don’t nod, who does?) to the mound-builders of Ohio with incomprehension and respect.  And when I’d tell her about the Bowery and Coney Island, and sing her a few songs that I’d heard the Jamaica niggers sing at their church lawn-parties, she didn’t look much less interested than she did when High Jack would tell her that he had a pipe that the first inhabitants of America originally arrived here on stilts after a freshet at Tenafly, New Jersey.

“But I was going to tell you more about High Jack.

“About six months ago I get a letter from him, saying he’d been commissioned by the Minority Report Bureau of Ethnology at Washington to go down to Mexico and translate some excavations or dig up the meaning of some shorthand notes on some ruins—­or something of that sort.  And if I’d go along he could squeeze the price into the expense account.