sketch of it, and later he found out from that rough sketch that it was a Whistler, and then this wonderful boy had an idea. All the Ducks are different; all have little blots and streaks that are their labels, or like the uniforms of soldiers. 'Now, if I can put their uniforms down on paper I'll know the Ducks as soon as I see them on a pond a long way off.' So he set to work and drew what he could find. One of his friends had a stuffed Wood-duck, so the 'Boy-that-wanted-to-know' drew that from a long way off. He got another from an engraving and two more from the window of a taxidermist shop. But he knew perfectly well that there are twenty or thirty different kinds of Ducks, for he often saw others at a distance and made far-sketches, hoping some day he'd find out what they were. Well, one day the 'Boy-that-wanted-to-know' sketched a new Duck on a pond, and he saw it again and again, but couldn't find out what it was, and there was his b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l sketch, but no one to tell him its name, so when he saw that he just had to go into the teepee and steal the First War Chief's last apple and eat it to hide his emotion."
Here Yan produced an apple and began to eat it with an air of sadness.
Without changing a muscle, the Great Woodpecker continued the tale:
"Then when the First War Chief heard the harrowing tale of a blighted life, he said: 'Shucks, I didn't want that old apple. It was fished out of the swill-barrel anyway, but 'pears to me when a feller sets [389] out to do a thing an' don't he's a 'dumb failure,' which ain't much difference from a 'durn fool.'
"Now, if this heroic youth had had gumption enough to come out flat-footed, an' instead of stealing rotten apples that the pigs has walked on, had told his trouble to the Great Head War Chief, that native-born noble Red-man would 'a' said: 'Sonny, quite right. When in doubt come to Grandpa. You want to get sharp on Duck. Ugh! Good'—then he'd 'a' took that simple youth to Downey's Hotel at Downey's Dump an' there showed him every kind o' Duck that ever was born, an' all tagged an' labelled. Wah! I have spoken."
And the Great Woodpecker scowled ferociously at Guy, who was vainly searching his face for a clue, not sure but what this whole thing was some subtle mockery. But Yan had been on the lookout for this. Sam's face throughout had shown nothing but real and growing interest. The good sense of this last suggestion was evident, and the result was an expedition was formed at once for Downey's Dump, a little town five miles away, where the railroad crossed a long bog on the Skagbog River. Here Downey, the contractor, had carried the railroad dump across a supposed bottomless morass and by good luck had soon made a bottom and in consequence a small fortune, with which he built a hotel, and was now the great man of the town for which he had done so much.
[390] "Guess we'll leave the Third War Chief in charge of camp," said Sam, "an' I think we ought to go disguised as Whites."
"You mean to go back to the Settlement and join the Whites?"
"Yep, an' take a Horse an' buggy, too. It's five miles."