"But—but what did they do to that woman at the cabin—and her baby?" wondered Vi with continued anxiety.
"I don't see any scalps," said Laddie confidently. "Maybe it isn't the fashion to scalp folks any more out here."
"You can ask Black Bear about that," chuckled Cowboy Jack. "I'm not up in the fashions, as you might say."
The big ranchman was evidently vastly amused by the little Bunkers' comments. The four children peered out of the wikiup and saw the party of horsemen dismount. A tall figure, with a waving headdress, came striding toward the children. Vi and Laddie, it must be confessed, shrank back behind the ranchman and daddy.
"Hullo!" exclaimed Cowboy Jack. "Here's Black Bear now."
"But he doesn't look like a bear," Laddie whispered. "Bears don't walk on their hind feet."
"Sometimes they do," said Daddy Bunker. "And this Bear does all the time. He is 'Mr. Bear' just the same as my name is 'Mr. Bunker.'"
The tall man lifted off his headdress and handed it to one of the women who came running to help him. Underneath, his hair was not like an Indian's at all—at least, not like the Indians whose pictures the Bunker children had seen. Black Bear's hair was cut pompadour, and if it had not been for the awful stripes across his face he would not have looked bad. Even Rose admitted this, in a whisper, to her brother Russ.
It was interesting for the four little Bunkers to watch Black Bear get rid of the paint with which his face was smeared. He stripped off the deerskin shirt he wore and squatted down on his heels before a box in the middle of the tent—a box like a little trunk. When he opened the cover and braced it up at a slant, the children saw that there was a mirror fastened in the box lid.
The Indian woman held a lantern, and Black Bear dipped his fingers in a jar of cold-cream and began to smear his whole face and neck. He looked all white and lathery in a moment, and he grinned in a funny way up at Cowboy Jack and Mr. Bunker.