We went back to camp feeling terribly blue.
Well, after supper and when it got almost dark, it was time for Eagle Eye’s blood curdling Indian story. We knew that he being a Christian Indian, would tell us a Bible story too, which is one reason why our parents had wanted us to come on this camping trip in the first place. Every night before we tumbled into bed, we would listen to a short talk from the Bible, and then somebody would lead us in prayer. Sometimes somebody gave us a talk about boys and what boys ought to know about themselves and God, and how God expected everybody in the world to behave themselves—things like that. Not a one of the gang was sissified enough to be ashamed of being a Christian, and as you know, every single one of us nearly always carried his New Testament with him wherever he went.
We started our evening campfire, which was going to be what is called an Indian fire. It was after Eagle Eye’s story that I found out about Little Tom’s terribly sad heart, and I was even gladder than I was that he hadn’t been with us in the afternoon. I’ll tell you about that in the very next chapter.
7
I THINK I never felt so sorry for anybody in my life as I did for Little red-haired Tom Till at the close of our camp fire that night.
It was fun having our big Indian guest, Eagle Eye, whom we all knew and liked very much, take charge of our meeting. He showed us how to build an Indian fire, which was like this: First he made a little wigwam of some dry tinder and slender sticks, and also some larger sticks all stacked up in the shape of an Indian tepee, with the top ends lapping over each other a little. Then he had us boys drag five or six big long poles from a little shelter nearby, where there was a place for keeping wood dry.
It was interesting to watch him ’cause just for fun he was wearing real Indian garb, with a headband filled with long pretty, different colored feathers, and clothes that looked like the kind I’d seen in pictures of Indians in our school library.
As soon as the little wigwam fire was laid, but not started yet, he took his bow and arrow and a board which he called a fire board, and in almost no time had a smallish fire started. It was a pretty sight to watch that little wigwam of tinder and sticks leap into flame and the long reddish-yellow tongues of fire go leaping up toward the sky. The smoke rose slowly, and spread itself out over our camp and sort of hung there like a big lazy bluish cloud.
Little Jim and I were sitting side by each, and Little red-haired Tom Till was right across the fire from me. The ground was still wet, so we were sitting on our camp chairs. It being a little chilly, I had a blanket wrapped around me, and had it spread out to cover Little Jim too, he being my favorite small guy of the whole gang. For some reason whenever he was with me, I seemed to be a better boy—or anyway, I wished I was. It was the easiest thing in the world to think about the Bible and God and about everybody needing to be saved, and things like that, when Little Jim was with us. And yet he was as much a red-blooded, rough-and-tumble boy as any of the rest of us. I never will forget the way he shot and killed a fierce old mad mother bear once down along Sugar Creek—which story you maybe know about, if you’ve read it in the book, “We Killed a Bear.”