"Naw!" answered Jim, with the intonation of supreme disgust; "I hain't no call to ask that; but what I'm curious about is whether the galoot as wrote the truck lied by accident—someone sort o' playin' it on him, ye see—er whether he thought the rest o' creation was chumps from away back, an' he just naturally laid himself out to sell them cheap—now say, which is it?"
In vain his monitor tried to impress on his mind the truth of the chronicles, and the fact that generations ago the Indian could be truly called a noble man, until his child-like faith in the straight tongue of the interloper had made a net for his feet, to escape which they had recourse only to treachery and the tomahawk, thus carving in history a character that in the beginning was not his, but one into which he was educated by the godly people who came with their churches and guns, their religion and whisky, to civilize the credulous people of the forests.
Jim listened, but in the supercilious disbelief in his eyes Rachel read the truth. In trying to establish historical facts for his benefit, she was simply losing ground in his estimation at every statement made.
"An' you," he finally remarked, after listening in wonderful silence for him—"an' you've read it all, then?"
"Yes, most of it."
"An' swallowed it as gospel?"
"Well, not exactly such literal belief as that; but I have read not only this history, but others in support of those facts."
"Ye have, have yeh?" remarked her pupil, with a sarcastic contempt for her book-learning. "Well, I allow this one will do me a life-time, fer I've seen Flatheads, an' Diggers, an' Snakes!"
Thus ended the first lesson in history.
"Don't you think," said Tillie softly to Stuart, "that Rachel would win more glory as a missionary to the Indians than among her own race? She is always running against stumbling-blocks of past knowledge with the progressive white man."