The pipe boy couldn’t help looking at the pistol again.
“Not a feeling!” cried Scipio. And he clapped Horacles between his little round shoulders. With head on one side, he looked down along his lengthy, jocular nose at Horacles for a moment. Then his eye shone upon the company like the edge of a knife—and they laughed at him because he was laughing so contagiously at them; a soft laugh, like the fall of moccasins. Often the Indian will join, like a child, in mirth which he does not comprehend. High Bear’s smile shone from his corner at young Scipio, whom he fancied so much that he had offered him his fourteenth daughter to wed as soon as his leg should be well. But Scipio had sorrowfully explained to the father that he was already married—which was true, but which I fear would in former days have proved no impediment to him. Perhaps some day I may tell you of the early marriages of Scipio as Scipio in hospital narrated them to me.
“Hey!” said High Bear now, to Scipio. “New store. Pretty good. Heap cheap.”
“Yes, High Bear. Heap cheap. You savvy why?”
With a long arm and an outstretched finger, Scipio suddenly pointed to Horacles. At this the Virginian’s hitherto unchanging face wakened to curiosity and attention. Scipio was now impressively and mysteriously nodding at the silver-haired chief in his bright, green blanket, and his long, fringed, yellow, soft buckskins.
“No savvy,” said High Bear, after a pause, with a tinge of caution. He had followed Scipio’s pointing finger to where Horacles was happily practising a trick with a glass and a silver dollar behind the counter.
“Heap cheap,” repeated Scipio, “because” (here he leaned close to High Bear and whispered) “because his uncle medicine-man. He big medicine-man, too.”
High Bear’s eyes rested for a moment on Horacles. Then he shook his head. “Ah, nah,” he grunted. “He not medicine-man. He fall off horse. He no catch horse. My little girl catch him. Ah, nah!” High Bear laughed profusely at “Sippo’s” joke. “Sippo” was the Indians’ English name for their vivacious friend. In their own language they called him something complimentary in several syllables, but it was altogether too intimate and too plain-spoken for me to repeat aloud. Into his whisper Scipio now put more electricity. “He’s big medicine-man,” he hissed again, and he drilled his bleached blue eye into the brown one of the savage. “See him now!” He stretched out a vibrating finger.
It was a pack of cards that Horacles was lightly manipulating. He fluttered it open in the air and fluttered it shut again, drawing it out like a concertina and pushing it flat like an opera hat—nor did a card fall to the ground.
High Bear watched it hard; but soon High Bear laughed. “He pretty good,” he declared. “All same tin-horn monte-man. I see one Miles City.”