Rolling Stones eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 276 pages of information about Rolling Stones.

Rolling Stones eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 276 pages of information about Rolling Stones.
the size of his words, but the way they come; and ’twasn’t his subjects, for he spoke of common things like cathedrals and football and poems and catarrh and souls and freight rates and sculpture.  Mrs. Conyers understood his accents, and the elegant sounds went back and forth between ’em.  And now and then Jefferson D. Peters would intervene a few shop-worn, senseless words to have the butter passed or another leg of the chicken.

“Yes, John Tom Little Bear appeared to be inveigled some in his bosom about that Mrs. Conyers.  She was of the kind that pleases.  She had the good looks and more, I’ll tell you.  You take one of these cloak models in a big store.  They strike you as being on the impersonal system.  They are adapted for the eye.  What they run to is inches around and complexion, and the art of fanning the delusion that the sealskin would look just as well on the lady with the warts and the pocket-book.  Now, if one of them models was off duty, and you took it, and it would say ‘Charlie’ when you pressed it, and sit up at the table, why, then you would have something similar to Mrs. Conyers.  I could see how John Tom could resist any inclination to hate that white squaw.

“The lady and the kid stayed at the hotel.  In the morning, they say, they will start for home.  Me and Little Bear left at eight o’clock, and sold Indian Remedy on the courthouse square till nine.  He leaves me and the Professor to drive down to camp, while he stays up town.  I am not enamored with that plan, for it shows John Tom is uneasy in his composures, and that leads to firewater, and sometimes to the green corn dance and costs.  Not often does Chief Wish-Heap-Dough get busy with the firewater, but whenever he does there is heap much doing in the lodges of the palefaces who wear blue and carry the club.

“At half-past nine Professor Binkly is rolled in his quilt snoring in blank verse, and I am sitting by the fire listening to the frogs.  Mr. Little Bear slides into camp and sits down against a tree.  There is no symptoms of firewater.

“‘Jeff,’ says he, after a long time, ’a little boy came West to hunt Indians.’

“‘Well, then?’ says I, for I wasn’t thinking as he was.

“‘And he bagged one,’ says John Tom, ’and ’twas not with a gun, and he never had on a velveteen suit of clothes in his life.’  And then I began to catch his smoke.

“‘I know it,’ says I.  ’And I’ll bet you his pictures are on valentines, and fool men are his game, red and white.’

“‘You win on the red,’ says John Tom, calm.  ’Jeff, for how many ponies do you think I could buy Mrs. Conyers?’

“‘Scandalous talk!’ I replies. ‘’Tis not a paleface custom.’  John Tom laughs loud and bites into a cigar.  ‘No,’ he answers; ’’tis the savage equivalent for the dollars of the white man’s marriage settlement.  Oh, I know.  There’s an eternal wall between the races.  If I could do it, Jeff, I’d put a torch to every white college that a redman has ever set foot inside.  Why don’t you leave us alone,’ he says, ’to our own ghost-dances and dog-feasts, and our dingy squaws to cook our grasshopper soup and darn our moccasins?’

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Project Gutenberg
Rolling Stones from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.