"I don't think," he said, "that they ought to smoke cigarettes."
"It does look like rather small business for an Indian, doesn't it?" answered Jack. "But then smoking cigarettes is small business for anybody. What's your idea of what an Indian ought to smoke?"
"Well, I'm not sure he ought to smoke anything, except of course the peace pipe occasionally. And he oughtn't to smoke that very much, because an Indian shouldn't make peace very often."
"Right on the war-path all the time, flourishing a scalping-knife above his head, and whooping his teeth loose—that's your notion of an Indian."
"Well, I don't know as that is exactly it," returned Ollie, doubtfully. "But it seems to me these aren't hardly right. Their clothes seem to be just like white people's."
"I don't know about that," said Jack. "I saw one when I went around to the post-office wearing bright Indian moccasins, a pair of soldier's trousers, a fashionable black coat, and a cowboy hat. I never saw a white man dressed just like that."
"Well, I think they ought to wear some feathers, anyhow," insisted Ollie. "An Indian without feathers is just like a—a turkey without 'em."
The Indians were idling all over town, big, lazy, villainous-looking fellows, and very frequently they were smoking cigarettes, and often they were dressed much as Jack had described, though their clothes varied a good deal. There were two points which they all had in common, however—they were all dirty, and all carried bright, clean repeating-rifles. We wondered why they needed the rifles, since there was no game in the neighborhood.
The chief business of Rushville seemed to be shipping bones. We went over to the railroad station to watch the process. There were great piles of them about the station, and men were loading them into freight cars.
"What's done with them?" we asked of a man.