the Editor offered to take him into his printing office as a “devil.”  For a while he seemed to be endeavoring, in his old literal way, to act up to that title.  He inked everything but the press.  He scratched Chinese characters of an abusive import on “leads,” printed them, and stuck them about the office; he put “punk” in the foreman’s pipe, and had been seen to swallow small type merely as a diabolical recreation.  As a messenger he was fleet of foot, but uncertain of delivery.  Some time previously the Editor had enlisted the sympathies of Mrs. Martin, the good-natured wife of a farmer, to take him in her household on trial, but on the third day Li Tee had run away.  Yet the Editor had not despaired, and it was to urge her to a second attempt that he dispatched that letter.

He was still gazing abstractedly into the depths of the wood when he was conscious of a slight movement—­but no sound—­in a clump of hazel near him, and a stealthy figure glided from it.  He at once recognized it as “Jim,” a well-known drunken Indian vagrant of the settlement—­tied to its civilization by the single link of “fire water,” for which he forsook equally the Reservation where it was forbidden and his own camps where it was unknown.  Unconscious of his silent observer, he dropped upon all fours, with his ear and nose alternately to the ground like some tracking animal.  Then having satisfied himself, he rose, and bending forward in a dogged trot, made a straight line for the woods.  He was followed a few seconds later by his dog—­a slinking, rough, wolf-like brute, whose superior instinct, however, made him detect the silent presence of some alien humanity in the person of the Editor, and to recognize it with a yelp of habit, anticipatory of the stone that he knew was always thrown at him.

“That’s cute,” said a voice, “but it’s just what I expected all along.”

The Editor turned quickly.  His foreman was standing behind him, and had evidently noticed the whole incident.

“It’s what I allus said,” continued the man.  “That boy and that Injin are thick as thieves.  Ye can’t see one without the other—­and they’ve got their little tricks and signals by which they follow each other.  T’other day when you was kalkilatin’ Li Tee was doin’ your errands I tracked him out on the marsh, just by followin’ that ornery, pizenous dog o’ Jim’s.  There was the whole caboodle of ’em—­including Jim—­campin’ out, and eatin’ raw fish that Jim had ketched, and green stuff they had both sneaked outer Johnson’s garden.  Mrs. Martin may take him, but she won’t keep him long while Jim’s round.  What makes Li foller that blamed old Injin soaker, and what makes Jim, who, at least, is a ‘Merican, take up with a furrin’ heathen, just gets me.”

The Editor did not reply.  He had heard something of this before.  Yet, after all, why should not these equal outcasts of civilization cling together!

*****