“How about that rent money I advanced, Rainwalker?” roared the bear-like middleman.
“I want my money for them wives I buried for you—_two of ’em_!” squeaked the scorpionlike undertaker, holding up two explanatory fingers and thrusting his thin, pale face into the mêlée.
“Ugh!” the old man answered rather unsatisfactorily.
“If you don’t pay me,” shrieked the incensed little undertaker, “I’ll go right out on the hill and _dig up them boxes, by God_!”
“_Muska ningay!_” (no money) said the old man. “No pay ’em chil’n’s money tall. All time lie to us. Goan votem Dimmiticrat, guess.”
And with this statement, bearing with it the fate of a national representative, the old chief kicked the tenacious slumber out of his pony and rode back to the Agency.
“Eh?” ejaculated the politician; “Votin’ Democratic, eh? Well, I’ll be cussed! It’ll snow us under! Why in thunder do they refuse to pay the money to the minor children? I tell you, gentlemen, it’ll snow us under!”
“Drat politics!” squeaked the little undertaker. “Wisht I’d a-buried ’em all afore now. Cussed if I don’t go right out on that there hill and dig them boxes up!”
The day wore on with an alarming recrudescence of Democracy among the red men (who are not red, but chocolate). In the afternoon, the little undertaker chased White Horse, another leading man of the tribe, into the brush and returned with a broad grin upon his face.
“Beats the devil!” ejaculated the thin politician, “where a body sometimes finds merriment! How’s he votin’, Comfort?”
“Votin’ Democrat—the whole cussed posse of ’em! But I don’t give a cuss—Democrat or Republican money’s all the same to me. I got $15; one of his kids I planted five years ago; died of Cuban itch; four-foot pine box! He, he, he! I don’t give a cuss how they’re votin’.”
That night there was a meeting of Republican politicians at the Agency office. A most alarming landslide had begun that day, bearing disaster to the ranks of the Grand Old Party.
“Some more of those confounded departmental rulings!” exclaimed the Agent to the company present. “It’s this grandmotherly solicitude for the Indian that makes him an irresponsible scamp. Why, if the Government had turned them all loose to sink or swim a decade ago, Natural Law would, by this time, have solved the much mooted Indian question. But what are we to do?” And the Agent stroked his Van Dyke beard in perplexity.