“Then the train rolled in, and a little woman in a gray dress, with sort of illuminating hair, slides off and looks around quick.  And the Boy Avenger sees her, and yells ‘Mamma,’ and she cries ‘O!’ and they meet in a clinch, and now the pesky redskins can come forth from their caves on the plains without fear any more of the rifle of Roy, the Red Wolf.  Mrs. Conyers comes up and thanks me an’ John Tom without the usual extremities you always look for in a woman.  She says just enough, in a way to convince, and there is no incidental music by the orchestra.  I made a few illiterate requisitions upon the art of conversation, at which the lady smiles friendly, as if she had known me a week.  And then Mr. Little Bear adorns the atmosphere with the various idioms into which education can fracture the wind of speech.  I could see the kid’s mother didn’t quite place John Tom; but it seemed she was apprised in his dialects, and she played up to his lead in the science of making three words do the work of one.

“That kid introduced us, with some footnotes and explanations that made things plainer than a week of rhetoric.  He danced around, and punched us in the back, and tried to climb John Tom’s leg.  ’This is John Tom, mamma,’ says he.  ’He’s a Indian.  He sells medicine in a red wagon.  I shot him, but he wasn’t wild.  The other one’s Jeff.  He’s a fakir, too.  Come on and see the camp where we live, won’t you, mamma?’

“It is plain to see that the life of the woman is in that boy.  She has got him again where her arms can gather him, and that’s enough.  She’s ready to do anything to please him.  She hesitates the eighth of a second and takes another look at these men.  I imagine she says to herself about John Tom, ‘Seems to be a gentleman, if his hair don’t curl.’  And Mr. Peters she disposes of as follows:  ‘No ladies’ man, but a man who knows a lady.’

“So we all rambled down to the camp as neighborly as coming from a wake.  And there she inspects the wagon and pats the place with her hand where the kid used to sleep, and dabs around her eyewinkers with her handkerchief.  And Professor Binkly gives us ‘Trovatore’ on one string of the banjo, and is about to slide off into Hamlet’s monologue when one of the horses gets tangled in his rope and he must go look after him, and says something about ‘foiled again.’

“When it got dark me and John Tom walked back up to the Corn Exchange Hotel, and the four of us had supper there.  I think the trouble started at that supper, for then was when Mr. Little Bear made an intellectual balloon ascension.  I held on to the tablecloth, and listened to him soar.  That redman, if I could judge, had the gift of information.  He took language, and did with it all a Roman can do with macaroni.  His vocal remarks was all embroidered over with the most scholarly verbs and prefixes.  And his syllables was smooth, and fitted nicely to the joints of his idea.  I thought I’d heard him talk before, but I hadn’t.  And it wasn’t