"Let me play too?" I pleaded.
"Can you follow a trail?" said Beppo's voice at my side.
"Sure."
"Well, you go down there," he pointed to Bill's cabbage patch, "and be a hostile, see?"
I saw. As I slipped down and hastened away as directed (avoiding the cabbages), it seemed to me absurdly paradoxical that the only way to be friendly with these precocious beings was to be a "hostile." I looked round. Beppo stood at rigid attention, and at the studio back window I saw two grinning heads surveying my performance. I was not at all clear in my mind how a hostile should act; it was thirty years since I had read "Deerslayer." Should I drop on my knees and crawl through the long grass, snooping round the beanpoles and taking the devoted block-house in flank? I swallowed my stiff-necked English pride and began to crawl. Then I saw a better plan. I slipped through the sparse line of dwarf oaks smothered with crimson poison-ivy that bordered the forest path and crept as silently as I could towards the street until I was abreast of the stump. As I paused Beppo was making his round of the fort and espied me. Instantly crying "Hostiles!" he presented his stick, banged, reloaded, banged again, reloaded and banged yet again. I took up a stick and presented it—bang! With amazing verisimilitude Beppo rolled over—shot through the heart. Really, for a moment I had a mad apprehension that in some occult way, some freak of hypnotic suggestion, I had actually wrought the child harm. I stood there breathlessly triumphant and wondering whether it was now my business to rush in and scalp the defenceless prisoners. I became aware of a head and a stick above the stump.
"Bang!" said the garrison. Obviously I was shot. I fell, desperately wounded, and endeavoured to drag myself away into the forest of dwarf oaks, when the garrison hailed me.
"Surrender!" he called, presenting his piece. I put up my hands. He climbed down nimbly.
"Now you help me bring in the dead and wounded," he ordered, and together we, the victorious garrison, dragged the slain warrior into the shadow of the stump. All at once he became alive, jumped up and danced gleefully.
"Say, that's bully!" he chanted. "You play some Indian!"
I looked down modestly and blushed I fear, for I knew that the grinning heads were still at the studio window.