James Claiborne grinned again. He had said more already than he was accustomed to, and apparently Marion’s statement did not strike him as being in need of any verbal acknowledgment.
“Here’s Jimmy!” shouted Moses, dashing out of the cabin in front of him, like a herald before a royal pageant. “Jimmy, here’s your pa!—Ain’t it the greatest thing you ever set your eyes on?” he whispered to Lincoln, as he squeezed close in to the quickly thickening group. “Think how Jimmy set out to find him, and the dangers he went through, and the suffering, and to have his pa just come strolling aboard—and a regular Indian chief!”
“I guess I had some hand in it,” said Lewis, darting a scornful look at Mose.
“H’m! Might have knowed you’d be grumbling because you ain’t the whole show,” retorted the ever-ready Mose.
Considered as a consummation, such as Moses described it, the meeting between Jimmy Claiborne and his father left a good deal to the imagination. Jimmy had advanced forward, thrust from behind, forcibly, rather than moved by an impelling filial emotion. Within arm’s length of the big Indian he came to a dead halt. The pressure from behind had withdrawn itself, leaving him rooted to the deck. He was face to face with his father, but it took a shrewd physiognomist to discover it. James Claiborne Hokomoke, on his side, made no advance. The traditions of fifteen years among the Indians may have made the American observances strike him as inadequate to the occasion. Perhaps he would have preferred to hold some sort of council, and sit in a circle for hours, before a word was spoken on either hand. The arksmen grew fidgety. Jimmy grew red. Some intuition of this embarrassment evidently stirred the white man’s brain in Hokomoke, bringing with it a train of more or less faded and obliterated memories.
“You my son?” he asked.
Jimmy hesitated. “I reckon I am,” he answered, deprecatingly. He did not mean to appear doubtful, but he was embarrassed. A more positive answer would have seemed to him pushing—like attracting attention to himself. His eyes strayed imploringly to Marion, but the young captain had stepped back to give him the entire floor.
“Humph! Ugly!” was his father’s comment.
There was a moment of astonishment at this unexpected sally. With his long scalp and forelock and the rest of his hair in half grown tufts, and the paint only partly worn off his face, Jimmy’s appearance certainly was not such as to make a parent proud. A great laugh went up from the men, in which Sam Hokomoke joined as heartily as any one, and with that laugh the atmosphere of constraint cleared, and Jimmy felt at ease.
The white man, who had so unaccountably turned his back on his family and disappeared for so many years, was almost indifferent to the news they poured into his ears about Fish Creek and its people. He asked no questions, but he listened with some show of interest to the things they told him of his father, and Maria, his wife. He accepted the hospitality which Marion extended him, but expressed no enthusiasm when it was proposed that he should return with them to Fish Creek in the autumn. He made no further explanation of his reluctance than might be gathered from the simple comment, “Squaw good,” and he had no messages for Maria, although to his father he sent several long speeches, beautiful with Indian symbolism and sentiment.