For a long time he lived with his father in a little shack over beyond Loon Lake, which was about seven miles away, and nobody had bothered him. He and his father had fished and hunted and one thing and another so as to get enough to eat. Then his father died and left Sammy all alone. He got along pretty good until winter, and it was a hard winter, so that there wasn’t much hunting, and he almost starved. When he came into town to get something to eat, begging, they clapped him into jail and then sent him off to the poor-farm.
It took him a long time to tell all of this, because every little while he’d stop and look at us pitiful and beg us not to tell on him or send him back, and then he’d go on again, but all the time he kept his eyes on us and started nervous-like whenever a twig snapped or a bird peeped back in the woods.
“Well,” says Mark, “I s’pose you’re a sort of wild man; but I’m glad you ain’t the kind we thought you were.”
“Sammy’s nice. Everybody like Sammy, sure.”
“About sendin’ him back,” I says to Mark, “it ain’t goin’ to be done. He’s Injun, and the woods and things is for Injuns, not poorfarms. He hadn’t ought to be shut up no more than a robin or a chipmunk, and he ain’t goin’ to be if I can help it.”
Sammy looked at me out of his big eyes so grateful I had to blink, and then he reached out with his great paw and patted the back of my hand.
“Boy good to Sammy,” he said. “Kind in his heart to poor Sammy.”
“Sure,” I told him; and there was a kind of a chunk in my throat.
“No,” says Mark, “he ain’t goin’ back. We’ll hide him and p-p-purtect him and shield him from his enemies.”
“Enemies?” I says. “He ain’t got no enemies that I know of. The folks at the poor-farm ain’t his enemies; they’re tryin’ to be kind to him.”