"My Adored Rachel: This is not a postscript, nor yet is it a mere subterfuge to give me a chance to call you 'adored' again. It is another letter under the same cover, because I just happened to think of something else I wanted to say. Miss Underwood is very proud, very sensitive, and, I suspect, more than a little in awe of the paragon of perfection who will receive this epistle. I think it would be a very 'nice' thing, as you would say, for you to write her a little letter, telling her how you will love her and all that. Who knows better how beautifully you can write when you want to than your own
"Blighted Being."
Burton mailed the letter without reading it over. It is possible that if he had applied his mind to the matter, he might have realized that it was not exactly the sort of an introduction that would make Miss Underwood persona grata to her future mother-in-law, for he had intervals of common sense; but his mind was otherwise engaged. So he sent the letter on its way with innocent cheerfulness.
[CHAPTER XIX]
BURTON GOES TO THE RESERVATION
It was a barren prospect that greeted Burton when he stepped from the train at the station,--the only passenger to alight. A bare windswept prairie; at a little distance, a colony of teepees, with fluttering rags and blankets blowing about, and a bunch of ponies nibbling at the coarse grass; and nothing to mark the hand of the white man but the rails which ran in gleaming and significant silence away. A man whose clothes were of the indistinguishable color of the sunburnt grass was sitting on the edge of the platform which made the whole of the station. He was dangling his feet over the edge and whittling, and it was this occupation quite as much as his looks that made Burton guess him to be a white man. He went up to him.
"Can you tell me where to find the Agent?" he asked.
The man had been staring at him intently as he approached, and now, after a pause that made Burton wonder whether he had been understood, the man cocked his thumb in the direction of a long frame building on the other side of the track. A man was standing in the doorway, watching the daily pageant of civilization represented by the passing train, and Burton approached him. Immediately the man to whom he had spoken slipped from the platform and ran, with a long lope, toward the teepees on the right.
Burton presented himself to the Indian Agent, introducing himself as an amateur on the subject of Indian basketry, who wished to add to his knowledge by studying the art among the Indians on the Reservation.
The Agent, whose name was Welch, evidently found some difficulty in adjusting his own point of view to that of his visitor, but Burton finally succeeded in convincing him that he was at least sane enough to receive the benefit of the doubt, and that there really were people who cared to know about what the Indians made for their own use.