“Here’s a good way to save labor,” Eagle Eye told us as soon as our wigwam fire had burned down a little. He picked up one of the long thick poles and dragged it to the fire and laid the end of it right across the still burning wigwam. Then he dragged up another pole and laid the end of it crosswise across the end of the first one. Pretty soon he had the ends of all the poles criss-crossed on each other on the fire with all the opposite ends stretching out in all directions like the spokes of a wagon wheel. Say, almost right away the big hot flames were leaping up like Circus’s pop’s hungry dogs leaping up around a Sugar Creek tree where they’ve treed a coon. It was certainly a pretty sight.
“Pretty soon, when the ends of the poles are burned up, we’ll push the poles up a little further,” Eagle Eye said, “and you won’t have to chop them in short pieces at all. When you want your fire to go out, at bed time, you just pull the poles back from the fire and pour water on the ends.”
I looked across at my Man Friday, and he grinned back at me and said, “I’d rather have him for my boss than—than Robinson Crusoe himself,” which was maybe half funny, I thought.
“Tomorrow night, you use the same poles, and not have to chop,” Eagle Eye explained.
Well, Eagle Eye wrapped his blanket around him and sat down on a log and began his story, first taking out his Bible—he, as you know, being a missionary to his own people.
Before he got started, though, Little Jim, who was cuddled up close to me, under my blanket, whispered, “That pretty blue smoke hanging up there, is like the pillar of cloud it tells about in the Bible. When it hung above the camp of the people of Israel, it meant God wanted them to stay there awhile, and when it lifted itself up higher, it meant they were supposed to travel on.”
I’d heard that story many a time in Sunday school or church, and liked it a lot. I didn’t understand it very well, though, not until that very second when Little Jim, who had his eyes focused on Eagle Eye as he opened his Bible and also at the blue cloud of smoke, said to me in my ear, “I’ll bet the cloud was there to show the people that God loved them and was right there to look after them and take care of them.”
Imagine that little guy thinking that, but it seemed like maybe he was right.
Then Eagle Eye told his story, which was a different kind of story than we had expected. It was all about how his father had been such a good father until he learned to drink whiskey, and then one night he had gotten drunk and had driven his car into a telephone pole away up at the place where the highway and the sandy road meet—“You boys notice next time you’re there. There’s a cross which the Highway Commission put there, to remind people that somebody met his death there by a car accident.”
Eagle Eye stopped talking a minute, and I saw him fumble under his blanket for something, and it was a handkerchief, which he used to wipe a couple of quick tears from his eyes. It was the first time I ever saw an Indian with tears in his eyes, and it gave me the queerest feeling, ’cause I realized that Indians were real people after all, and could feel sad inside, and love their parents, the same as anybody else God had made.