With his head cocked on one side, Cap’n Wiley had been watching the meeting between the Indian and his young friends. Wiley now turned to Buckhart and remarked:
“I am learning extensively in this variegated world. As the years roll on my accumulation of knowledge increases with susceptible rapidity. Up to the present occasion I have been inclined to think that about the only thing a real Injun could be good for was for a target. It seems to my acute perception that in this immediate instance there is at least one exception to the rule. Although yonder copper-hued individual looks somewhat scarred and weather-beaten, I observe that Richard Merriwell hesitates in no degree to embrace him. Who is the old tike, mate?”
“Why, old Joe Crowfoot!” answered Brad. “The only Indian I ever saw of his kind.”
Immediately Wiley approached old Joe, walking teeteringly on the balls of his feet, after his own peculiar fashion, made a salute, and exclaimed:
“I salute you, Joseph Crowfoot, Esquire, and may your shadow never grow less. May you take your medicine regularly and live to the ripe round age of one hundred years. Perhaps you don’t know me. Perhaps you haven’t heard of me. That is your misfortune. I am Cap’n Wiley, a rover of the briny deep and a corking first-class baseball player. Ever play baseball, Joe, old boy? It’s a great game. You would enjoy it. In my mind’s eye I see you swing the bat like a war club and swat the sphere hard enough to dent it. Or perchance you are attempting to overhaul the base runner, and I see him fleeing wildly before you, as if he fancied you were reaching for his scalp locks.”
“Ugh!” grunted old Joe. “No know who um be; but know heap good name for um. Joe he give you name. He call you Wind-in-the-head.”
At this the others, with the exception of Wiley himself, laughed outright. The sailor, however, did not seem at all pleased.
“It’s plain, Joseph,” he observed, “that you have a reckless little habit of getting gay occasionally. Take my advice and check that habit before it leads you up against a colossal calamity.”
“Wind-in-the-head he talk heap many big words,” said the Indian. “Mebbe sometime he talk big words that choke him.”
“That’s a choke, Wiley,” laughed Dick.