Jack recovered his normal condition more readily than did Yamanatz. Before leaving the "Lone Fisherman," which the old prospector found of value sufficient to pay for working, Yamanatz and Jack again made the trip to and from the nearest located triangle and Jack had no trouble in future visits. He soon succeeded in obtaining from the Government a valid title to the ground.
The nucleus of that fortune was spent in fitting Chiquita for her college education.
She entered at once upon her studies, under the care of private tutors, and in two years' time the rapid advancement made placed her far along toward the goal of learning. Academic courses followed in quick succession, her wonderful intellectual powers seemingly never to weary or flag in their grinding evolution from savagery to civilized enlightenment during her self-imposed task of ten years in the bright fields of knowledge.
[CHAPTER XI.]
COLLEGE VACATIONS.
During one of the spring terms, when the birds taunted Chiquita with their freedom, Jack and Hazel proposed, during the recess of two weeks, that they all take a trip to the Indian Territory and visit the Cherokees, Kiowas and Comanches, among whose tribes were many relatives of Chiquita. Over a rough and dusty roadbed rolled a long train of coaches bearing tourists, farmseekers and business men through banks of smoke and clouds of cinders to the great farming lands of the west. At Coffeyville Jack disembarked his party and in a comfortable "buckboard" continued the journey. A couple of miles of dusty road between sweltering hedges of osage orange led them to the boundary of the Indian Territory. Along this in a never varying line for a hundred miles on the north side stretched farm after farm, divided from the highway and each other by thousands of miles of wire fencing. Bare cornfields and treeless wastes spread forth uninviting landscape, marked at intervals with the houses of the ambitious ranchmen, who, by preoccupation or purchase, obtained title to the soil. Alkali dust smarted the nostrils, and the glare of the noonday sun scorched the faces of travelers. Plowmen, making ready for the season's planting, rested their teams as the pleasure seekers stopped to inquire the road to California Creek.
To the south of the highway rolled a grass-covered prairie that seemed a great poly-chromed rug of velvet. The hand of man had not chiseled the virgin soil with plowshare, nor riveted its surface with post and rail. A well defined road led zigzag over its undulating bosom until the hideous regularity of section lines disappeared behind a friendly stretch of upland. Cottonwood, elm and oak became frequent as they entered the valley of the Verdigris and great stretches of forest-dotted park enchanted the eye and gave rest to tiresome monotony of treeless plain. Occasionally an unpretentious, unpainted shanty gave evidence of man, and inquiry proved it to be the abiding place of one of the precivilized occupants of unfettered expanse of the American continent, the other a "squaw man," who had made matrimonial alliance with the partially civilized companion.
"Jack," said Chiquita, after the inspection of one of these abodes of an Indian, who had adopted some of the ways and customs of his white brethren, "Cherokee once big Indian, now half man, half coyote; little plow, little hunt, little eat—little good," and she curled her lip in disdain as she contemplated the work of onwardness. Continuing the conversation in the more polished language of a college student, "Did not the Great Spirit, the one God of the Indians, put his people here in this paradise—this continent of flower-carpeted, forest-grown hills and vales, a people noble in thought, noble in dignified demeanor, with a belief in a religion simple and effective? Among Indians are no infidels or agnostics. All Indians believe in the Happy Hunting Ground and the Great Spirit. Do you know, Jack, of any country where the native race, indigenous to the land, compare with the noble red man as he was when the first white settlers occupied America?"
"Possibly the Arabs or early Egyptians might compare more favorably than any other nation that I know of," Jack replied.
"Yes, but Egypt and Arabia are of today, whereas the Indians are wards of a great government, and your government has condemned the Indian to a worse Siberia than that to which Nihilist was ever transported. Look; there is a specimen of what a civilized government does to a native-born American," pointing to a "half-breed" trying to plow with one steer harnessed up like a horse.