[FINISH OF AN EDUCATED RED MAN.]
He Was Too Handy with the Pasteboards, Wherefore He Arrived Prematurely in the "Happy Hunting Grounds."
"It happens more or less frequently," said a traveling Inspector of Indian Agencies, "that an educated buck Indian degenerates in the long run into a bad proposition. I'm thinking particularly of an educated Oregon Indian, about a three-quarter blood, who got the big-head so bad after he had been polished off mentally back this way that he never mixed up with his people when he returned from the East. He was a Umatilla. He was first sent to Carlisle, and when he had finished there he was passed on to Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore, to take the law course there. It was in view that he was to become the attorney for his tribe upon the conclusion of his Blackstone-thumbing. He squeezed through the law at Johns Hopkins, and then he was told of the nice fat thing that awaited him out among his own people. He turned the proposition down cold. He said flatly that he had no intention whatever of mixing up with his own bunch at all any more. He likewise remarked that he knew his gait, and that he intended to follow it.
"A couple of months after he quit Baltimore he turned up at The Dalles in Western Oregon and settled down to the career of a short poker player. Where he had picked up the game it would be hard to say; but he certainly was a daisy at it. There wasn't a kink in the game that he didn't have the hang of. Now, The Dalles isn't any bad man's camp; it is a very beautiful health resort in the Cascade Mountains, on the south bank of the Columbia River; there wasn't a hard character in the place until this educated buck established his headquarters there; and it suited his game to a T. He made it his business to nail young tourists who didn't have any more sense than to sit into a poker game with a stranger, much less an Indian, and an educated Indian at that; and he just stripped them in sets of fours for several years. He was a splendid-looking buck and he dressed as men dress who've got the money to tog themselves out right back this way. When he was engaged in the act of getting a new victim he knew how to throw much cordiality and some grace into his manners; but ordinarily he was a sulky, morose, bad Indian. 'Way down in the deeps of him he was a rank coward, for he never tried to twist his tentacles about a man who he thought would make a stand, much less a scrap, upon discovering that he was being done; he always picked out palpable lily-livers who looked, to his shrewd eye, as if they would stand for anything rather than mix it up with him.
"It did not take the square people of The Dalles long to get next to the fact that this educated Indian, who had coolly taken up his abode among them, was a cheat and a swindler, and that his sole occupation consisted in fleecing pulp-headed young tourists. They talked a great deal of giving him the razzle-dazzle and chasing him out, but somehow or other this suggestion never came to a head. The men at The Dalles who had the interest of the place at heart would point the swellerino buck out to young strangers who looked as if they might be likely victims of the Indian short-card fleecer, and tell the young goslings just where and how the buck stood. It may sound incredible, but even after being warned in this fashion a whole lot of the young addlepates fell into the buck's mesh and got themselves done to a proper turn by him. They were able to take care of themselves, they would reply chestily to their warners, and, just to prove it, they'd take a hack at the Indian's game. When they got through they'd be smoking punk tobacco in pipes while the Indian would be blowing the smoke of perfectos in their faces, and they'd stand for their craggy end of it without a whistle. The buck was 6 feet 3 inches high and weighed 235 pounds, and he looked like a macerator from the high ridges. So he was never called by any of his Dalles victims, even when they knew the details of how they'd been plucked. One poor little devil of a rich man's son from Omaha whimpered one night when the Indian had removed about $800 from him by dealing from both ends and the middle of the deck, and he said to the buck piteously:
"'I just hope you've played fair, that's all.'
"The Indian reached over and struck the pollywog with all of his force on both sides of the face with his two open palms, leaving the blood-red welt marks of his fingers on the lamb's fair cheeks. The whining victim drilled for his life up the hotel stairs to his room, and the Indian looked after him sardonically. There wasn't a man about that didn't know that the Indian had scandalously cheated the lad, but not a one of them said a word. There was a keen-eyed, big-framed, prematurely gray-haired man, a stranger, standing at the hotel desk reading a just-arrived letter, when the thing happened. His face flushed angrily when he saw the burly Indian slap the undersized fool of a boy, and he turned to the hotel clerk and remarked:
"'Is this the real thing here? Does the gang stand for that kind of work on the part of a mud-hided raw-meater?' There was plenty of contempt in the way the stranger spoke.
"The clerk shrugged his shoulders. 'We can't undertake to cut in on any of the plays of our guests,' he replied. 'We just board and lodge 'em, that's all. If they're jays enough to mix up with grafters, it's their game, and we're not asking for any rake-off, one way or the other.'
"The stranger muttered something about a chicken-livered population, and strolled out. He took his train an hour or so later.