“At the hotel we found a mass meeting of five infuriated citizens chewing tobacco and denouncing the outrage.  Most of the town was asleep by ten o’clock.  I talks the lady some quiet, and tells her I will take the one o’clock train for the next town, forty miles east, for it is likely that the esteemed Mr. Conyers will drive there to take the cars.  ‘I don’t know,’ I tells her, ’but what he has legal rights; but if I find him I can give him an illegal left in the eye, and tie him up for a day or two, anyhow, on a disturbal of the peace proposition.’

“Mrs. Conyers goes inside and cries with the landlord’s wife, who is fixing some catnip tea that will make everything all right for the poor dear.  The landlord comes out on the porch, thumbing his one suspender, and says to me: 

“’Ain’t had so much excitements in town since Bedford Steegall’s wife swallered a spring lizard.  I seen him through the winder hit her with the buggy whip, and everything.  What’s that suit of clothes cost you you got on?  ’Pears like we’d have some rain, don’t it?  Say, doc, that Indian of yorn’s on a kind of a whizz to-night, ain’t he?  He comes along just before you did, and I told him about this here occurrence.  He gives a cur’us kind of a hoot, and trotted off.  I guess our constable ’ll have him in the lock-up ‘fore morning.’

“I thought I’d sit on the porch and wait for the one o’clock train.  I wasn’t feeling saturated with mirth.  Here was John Tom on one of his sprees, and this kidnapping business losing sleep for me.  But then, I’m always having trouble with other people’s troubles.  Every few minutes Mrs. Conyers would come out on the porch and look down the road the way the buggy went, like she expected to see that kid coming back on a white pony with a red apple in his hand.  Now, wasn’t that like a woman?  And that brings up cats.  ‘I saw a mouse go in this hole,’ says Mrs. Cat; ’you can go prize up a plank over there if you like; I’ll watch this hole.’

“About a quarter to one o’clock the lady comes out again, restless, crying easy, as females do for their own amusement, and she looks down that road again and listens.  ‘Now, ma’am,’ says I, ’there’s no use watching cold wheel-tracks.  By this time they’re halfway to—­’ ‘Hush,’ she says, holding up her hand.  And I do hear something coming ‘flip-flap’ in the dark; and then there is the awfulest war-whoop ever heard outside of Madison Square Garden at a Buffalo Bill matinee.  And up the steps and on to the porch jumps the disrespectable Indian.  The lamp in the hall shines on him, and I fail to recognize Mr. J. T. Little Bear, alumnus of the class of ’91.  What I see is a Cherokee brave, and the warpath is what he has been travelling.  Firewater and other things have got him going.  His buckskin is hanging in strings, and his feathers are mixed up like a frizzly hen’s.  The dust of miles is on his moccasins, and the light in his eye is the kind the aborigines wear.  But in his arms he brings that kid, his eyes half closed, with his little shoes dangling and one hand fast around the Indian’s collar.