"Come on," said Joe Carter; "let 'em stay there and play with the hose. They don't know how to be Indians, anyway. We'll go back to the barn, and lasso buffaloes."
"Come on," said Peter, and the whole band of cowboys departed.
Then the victorious Indians, the two triumphant _Sigh-ux_, danced a short war-dance, and whooped two or three war-whoops,--so loud that Mr. Hawkins opened his gate, and came out to the sidewalk to see what was the matter.
About the middle of the month my family went to spend a week or two in a cottage at a neighboring beach. I enjoyed being at the sea-side, but I was hard up for playmates. For a few days there was a boy in the cottage next ours, and he spent most of his time riding around the veranda on a velocipede.
This made me feel that I needed a velocipede, too, and I suggested to my father that he supply my lack.
"You shall have one," he said,--"when my ship comes in."
I had never heard of the ship before--had never known that my father owned so much as a rowboat. But he had said it himself--I was to have a velocipede "when his ship came in." I tried to find out how soon he expected her, and where she was coming from. But he was hurrying away to take the train which carried him each day to the city, and I could get no particulars about his ship. He laughed, waved his hand, and was gone.
This left me rather dissatisfied, but I reflected, as I strolled around the veranda, that it was a good thing I had heard about this ship while we were living at the seashore. At home there was less opportunity to watch for ships. Here I saw dozens of them every day. Sometimes there would not be one in sight when I went to bed, but in the morning seven or eight would ride at anchor a mile or more from the beach.
Great steamers passed along, leaving a trail of smoke behind, and once or twice I had seen dainty yachts, glittering with white paint and polished brass. Then heavy barges would go slowly by, pulled by puffing tugs. I had been told that they were loaded with coal, and I hoped that my father's ship was not one of them. If there was a velocipede for me on a barge, it would get black and sooty. I much preferred to have it come by one of the yachts--or, wait a moment--once there had swept by a fine three-masted schooner, her hull painted white and all her sails set. She was a beauty, and she looked big enough to sail around, the world by herself. The yachts could hardly do that.