"I guess it does," said Sandboys. "It would work too."
"It might be dangerous for two or three seasons for the guests, though," said Bobbie. "I don't think I'd want to go to a place for the summer where the Indians were thick and still wild. I don't want to get scalped."
"Oh, you'd be all right as long as you wasn't a dude!" rejoined Sandboys. "Now that the dudes has taken to wearin' their hair long in the back, no wild Indian's goin' to bother with boys. There's no fun scalpin' a small boy, with football scalps in sight. You've hit on the great trouble about Indians, though," Sandboys added, reflectively. "You can civilize 'em. You can teach 'em Latin, Greek, French, or plumbing. You can teach 'em to dance and sing. You can make 'em wear swaller-tail coats and knickerbockers instead o' paint an' hoss blankets, but you can't entirely kill their taste for takin' hair that don't belong to 'em. It was on just that point that I had my only experience with Indians in this place here, and I tell you what there was lively times that summer. It nearly ruined this hotel, and if it hadn't been for me, I kind o' think it would have been goin' on yet.
"It was back in the eighties somewhere that it happened. I don't remember whether it was '87 or '88. Tennyrate, it was the year Mr. Hicks's boy Jimmie caught a five-pound bass in Echo Lake with his Waterbury watch. Ever hear about that? Funniest thing y' ever heard of. Jimmie Hicks was the liveliest little boy you ever saw. You two rolled into one wouldn't be half as lively. He was everywhere at once, Jimmie was. He's the boy that busted the hole in the roof with the elevator. Set the thing goin' up, couldn't stop it, and bang! first thing he knew the whole thing had smashed up through the roof and toppled over on its side. He had a watch—a Waterbury watch. His father got it for him just because it took an hour to wind it up, and that kept Jimmie busy for an hour a day, anyhow, an' he used to be doin' everything he could with it. I've seen him smash a black fly on the wall with it, usin' it like a sling-shot; but the queerest thing of the lot was his catchin' the bass with it. He was out in a boat, an' nothin' would do but he should trail that watch in the water after him. The bass he see it, thought it was a shiner, snapped at it, swallered it, and Jimmie pulls him in. Weighed five pounds an' three ounces on the office scales. It was that year we had the time with old Rocky Face—I don't remember his Indian name, but Rocky Face was what it meant in English.
"He was a quiet, peaceable, civilized old Indian, and the last of the old tribe that used to live about here. The others had fled to Nebrasky, as I told you, because they couldn't stand the expense of livin' in the White Mountains, but Rocky Face said they couldn't freeze him out. He'd been born here, and he was goin' to die here, if he had to steal a livin'. So he staid on, an' lived in an old pine-bough shanty he built for himself up on the other side of Mount Lafyette. What he fed on nobody knew, but every once in a while he'd turn up at the hotel and ask what they'd charge to let him look at the clock, and everybody'd laugh, and call him a droll old Indian, and ask him to come back. Finally he got to makin' baskits and birch-bark canoes and bows and arrows, and he'd sell 'em to the guests. They took so many of 'em that Rocky Face soon got to earnin' twenty an' thirty dollars a day, an' when he got to that point he could afford a small back room in the hotel, and so he came here to live.
"He became one of what they call the features of the place, an' they got to puttin' his picture in the hotel perspectacle."
"Prospectus, do you mean?" queried Bob.
