“John Tom Little Bear was an educated Cherokee Indian and an old friend of mine when I was in the Territories.  He was a graduate of one of them Eastern football colleges that have been so successful in teaching the Indian to use the gridiron instead of burning his victims at the stake.  As an Anglo-Saxon, John Tom was copper-colored in spots.  As an Indian, he was one of the whitest men I ever knew.  As a Cherokee, he was a gentleman on the first ballot.  As a ward of the nation, he was mighty hard to carry at the primaries.

“John Tom and me got together and began to make medicine—­how to get up some lawful, genteel swindle which we might work in a quiet way so as not to excite the stupidity of the police or the cupidity of the larger corporations.  We had close upon $500 between us, and we pined to make it grow, as all respectable capitalists do.

“So we figured out a proposition which seems to be as honorable as a gold mine prospectus and as profitable as a church raffle.  And inside of thirty days you find us swarming into Kansas with a pair of fluent horses and a red camping wagon on the European plan.  John Tom is Chief Wish-Heap-Dough, the famous Indian medicine man and Samaritan Sachem of the Seven Tribes.  Mr. Peters is business manager and half owner.  We needed a third man, so we looked around and found J. Conyngham Binkly leaning against the want column of a newspaper.  This Binkly has a disease for Shakespearian roles, and an hallucination about a 200 nights’ run on the New York stage.  But he confesses that he never could earn the butter to spread on his William S. roles, so he is willing to drop to the ordinary baker’s kind, and be satisfied with a 200-mile run behind the medicine ponies.  Besides Richard III, he could do twenty-seven coon songs and banjo specialties, and was willing to cook, and curry the horses.  We carried a fine line of excuses for taking money.  One was a magic soap for removing grease spots and quarters from clothes.  One was a Sum-wah-tah, the great Indian Remedy made from a prairie herb revealed by the Great Spirit in a dream to his favorite medicine men, the great chiefs McGarrity and Siberstein, bottlers, Chicago.  And the other was a frivolous system of pick-pocketing the Kansasters that had the department stores reduced to a decimal fraction.  Look ye!  A pair of silk garters, a dream book, one dozen clothespins, a gold tooth, and ‘When Knighthood Was in Flower’ all wrapped up in a genuine Japanese silkarina handkerchief and handed to the handsome lady by Mr. Peters for the trivial sum of fifty cents, while Professor Binkly entertains us in a three-minute round with the banjo.

“’Twas an eminent graft we had.  We ravaged peacefully through the State, determined to remove all doubt as to why ’twas called bleeding Kansas.  John Tom Little Bear, in full Indian chief’s costume, drew crowds away from the parchesi sociables and government ownership conversaziones.  While at the football college in the East he had acquired quantities of rhetoric and the art of calisthenics and sophistry in his classes, and when he stood up in the red wagon and explained to the farmers, eloquent, about chilblains and hyperaesthesia of the cranium, Jeff couldn’t hand out the Indian Remedy fast enough for ’em.