_He Was Too Handy with the Pasteboards, Wherefore He Arrived Prematurely
in the "Happy Hunting Grounds."_
"It happens more or less frequently," said a traveling Inspector of
Indian Agencies, "that an educated buck Indian degenerates in the long
run into a bad proposition. I'm thinking particularly of an educated
Oregon Indian, about a three-quarter blood, who got the big-head so bad
after he had been polished off mentally back this way that he never
mixed up with his people when he returned from the East. He was a
Umatilla. He was first sent to Carlisle, and when he had finished there
he was passed on to Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore, to take the law course
there. It was in view that he was to become the attorney for his tribe
upon the conclusion of his Blackstone-thumbing. He squeezed through the
law at Johns Hopkins, and then he was told of the nice fat thing that
awaited him out among his own people. He turned the proposition down
cold. He said flatly that he had no intention whatever of mixing up with
his own bunch at all any more. He likewise remarked that he knew his
gait, and that he intended to follow it.
"A couple of months after he quit Baltimore he turned up at The Dalles
in Western Oregon and settled down to the career of a short poker
player. Where he had picked up the game it would be hard to say; but he
certainly was a daisy at it. There wasn't a kink in the game that he
didn't have the hang of. Now, The Dalles isn't any bad man's camp; it is
a very beautiful health resort in the Cascade Mountains, on the south
bank of the Columbia River; there wasn't a hard character in the place
until this educated buck established his headquarters there; and it
suited his game to a T. He made it his business to nail young tourists
who didn't have any more sense than to sit into a poker game with a
stranger, much less an Indian, and an educated Indian at that; and he
just stripped them in sets of fours for several years. He was a
splendid-looking buck and he dressed as men dress who've got the money
to tog themselves out right back this way. When he was engaged in the
act of getting a new victim he knew how to throw much cordiality and
some grace into his manners; but ordinarily he was a sulky, morose, bad
Indian. 'Way down in the deeps of him he was a rank coward, for he never
tried to twist his tentacles about a man who he thought would make a
stand, much less a scrap, upon discovering that he was being done; he
always picked out palpable lily-livers who looked, to his shrewd eye, as
if they would stand for anything rather than mix it up with him.
"It did not take the square people of The Dalles long to get next to the
fact that this educated Indian, who had coolly taken up his abode among
them, was a cheat and a swindler, and that his sole occupation consisted
in fleecing pulp-headed young tourists. They talked a great deal of
giving him the razzle-dazzle and chasing him out, but somehow or other
this suggestion never came to a head. The men at The Dalles who had the
interest of the place at heart would point the swellerino buck out to
young strangers who looked as if they might be likely victims of the
Indian short-card fleecer, and tell the young goslings just where and
how the buck stood. It may sound incredible, but even after being warned
in this fashion a whole lot of the young addlepates fell into the buck's
mesh and got themselves done to a proper turn by him. They were able to
take care of themselves, they would reply chestily to their warners,
and, just to prove it, they'd take a hack at the Indian's game. When
they got through they'd be smoking punk tobacco in pipes while the
Indian would be blowing the smoke of perfectos in their faces, and
they'd stand for their craggy end of it without a whistle. The buck was
6 feet 3 inches high and weighed 235 pounds, and he looked like a
macerator from the high ridges. So he was never called by any of his
Dalles victims, even when they knew the details of how they'd been
plucked. One poor little devil of a rich man's son from Omaha whimpered
one night when the Indian had removed about $800 from him by dealing
from both ends and the middle of the deck, and he said to the buck
piteously:
"'I just hope you've played fair, that's all.'
"The Indian reached over and struck the pollywog with all of his force
on both sides of the face with his two open palms, leaving the blood-red
welt marks of his fingers on the lamb's fair cheeks. The whining victim
drilled for his life up the hotel stairs to his room, and the Indian
looked after him sardonically. There wasn't a man about that didn't know
that the Indian had scandalously cheated the lad, but not a one of them
said a word. There was a keen-eyed, big-framed, prematurely gray-haired
man, a stranger, standing at the hotel desk reading a just-arrived
letter, when the thing happened. His face flushed angrily when he saw
the burly Indian slap the undersized fool of a boy, and he turned to the
hotel clerk and remarked:
"'Is this the real thing here? Does the gang stand for that kind of work
on the part of a mud-hided raw-meater?' There was plenty of contempt in
the way the stranger spoke.
"The clerk shrugged his shoulders. 'We can't undertake to cut in on any
of the plays of our guests,' he replied. 'We just board and lodge 'em,
that's all. If they're jays enough to mix up with grafters, it's their
game, and we're not asking for any rake-off, one way or the other.'
"The stranger muttered something about a chicken-livered population, and
strolled out. He took his train an hour or so later.
"At certain seasons of the year, when there wasn't must doing in his
line at The Dalles, owing to periodical scarcities of pluckable
tourists, the Indian would hit up Baker City, Pendleton, and other
Oregon towns in search of good things, and a couple of times a year he
included Olympia and Walla Walla in his itinerary. He sung somewhat
smaller in those places than he did at The Dalles, but by keeping his
eye skinned for men liable to call the turn on him and working quietly
he generally succeeded in pulling apart at least one jelly-fish in each
of the towns he took in on these off-season tours.
"About three months after he had left the marks of his fingers on the
lamb's face at The Dalles--this was in the fall of '92--he turned up one
day at Walla Walla. He strolled around the hotel corridors with an eye
to business, and along toward night he met with a young fellow named
Hellen, whose father, a wealthy Chicago man, had recently foreclosed a
mortgage on a big ranch about sixty miles from Walla Walla. The son, a
rather raw young chap, had come out to look the ranch over, and the
Indian got next to him as soon as he struck the town. The buck was an
expert billiard player, and he suggested a game of pin billiards to the
young Hellen chap. He played off on the youth, and soon got him to
betting on shots. After losing about a dozen $5 bets on shots, the
Indian socked it to the young man from Chicago by betting $300 that he
could execute a certain difficult shot. It looked like board and lodging
to the young man that the Indian's $300 would spin into his clothes, so
he put up $300. The Indian made the shot with consummate ease and took
down the pot.
"'Fluke!' said young Hellen. 'I'll go you another $300.'
"The buck got this bunch, too, without half trying. It would naturally
be thought that the tenderfoot would have smelt a rat by this time. But
he didn't. He had plenty of money, and probably he considered it piquant
to lose his coin to a swagger-looking, educated Indian. Anyhow, the two
were playing poker in the card-room of Walla Walla's stag hotel half an
hour later.
"There were plenty of men in that card-room who knew that the Indian was
a short-carder, but men out that way aren't garrulous, and they pay a
heap of attention to the job of minding their own business. The youth
from Chicago was the merest mutt in the hands of the Indian, and he lost
from the jump. He would stand pat on a full house, and the buck, drawing
three cards, would still beat him after sky-scraping betting. A number
of onlookers at the game may have seen the little side-plays of the
Indian, but they only grinned at each other over the hopeless imbecility
of the young man from Chicago.
"Finally the Indian, perhaps losing some of his dexterity from the
drinks he was steadily absorbing, over-stepped himself. He filled two
pairs from the discard and he did it clumsily. The young man with whom
he was playing saw the move.
"'I say, there,' said he, 'what are you doing there, you know?' pointing
to the discard. 'Didn't you--er--didn't you make a mistake and take a
card out of that pile?'
"The Indian, who was about $1,600 to the good, had cold feet, anyhow,
and so he threw his hand face downward on the table and glared at the
Chicago boy. The Chicago boy quailed.
"'Er--well, maybe I made the mistake myself'--he started to say, when a
big voice cut in with:
"'No, you didn't son. You didn't make any mistake at all. You're up
against the real thing in the way of a mud-skinned short-riffler, that's
all.'
"A keen-eyed, big-framed, prematurely gray-haired man was the speaker.
As he spoke he reached down from behind the Indian's chair and got two
huge hands around the buck's neck. The onlookers formed a clearing. The
Chicago youth got himself on the outskirts of the bunch.
"'About three months ago,' said the keen-eyed man, dragging the huge,
half-choked Indian to his feet, 'I saw you at The Dalles leave the
prints of your dirty fingers on the face of a little whiffet you had
just fleeced. I hankered then to confer a few personally conducted slaps
of my own make and manufacture on your coppery jowls, but for some
reason or other I passed the hanker up on that occasion. Well, the slaps
are coming to you now. It's better late than never, and I'm going to
slap you into jerked beef just for luck.'
"The buck was finally up against the real thing, and he knew it. I'll
bet that his face was whiter than mine is now when the big-framed man,
who had the devil of anger lurking in his eyes, suddenly loosed his
right hand from around the Indian's neck, and, still clutching him by
the left, swept the loose arm back for the momentum and brought his
heavy palm smack against the buck's left cheek with a noise that sounded
like the explosion of a charge of blasting powder. The slap rattled the
Indian's teeth and made his big head joggle from side to side like the
head of an automaton. Clutching the Indian's throat again then with his
right hand, the big-framed man repeated the slapping performance on the
Indian's right cheek with his left hand, and left a welt there that
might have been made by a cat-o'-nine tails. The buck was too dazed, in
the first place, by the suddenness of it all, to make a move: in the
second place, he was too cowardly. The big-framed man--he was an expert
mining engineer from Nevada, and his name was Varus Pryor--slapped the
Indian's face, first with his right and then with his left, for three
minutes, with all his might, and then, getting behind the buck,
proceeded to slap him into the street. With first one hand and then the
other clutching the collar of the Indian's coat, he slapped him out to
the front door of the hotel. Then he gave the buck the knee in the small
of the back, and hoisted him across the pavement to the middle of the
street, where the Indian spun around and fell for a moment.
"'I don't care what the Indian Bureau says about it,' said the keen-eyed
man, standing in the doorway of the hotel. 'God Almighty never intended
that white men should stand for such alligators as that copper-mugged
swindler, and'----
"'Stand clear, pard, he's going to plug you!' shouted a man from a
second-story window of the hotel.
"The Indian, pretending to be hurt, and only half risen to his feet in
the obscurity of the middle of the street, had got his gun out, and the
yell from the second story reached Pryor just in time. As it was, the
buck planted a ball in the front door of the hotel, only two inches
above the big-framed man's head. By that time Pryor's gun was working,
and he drilled six holes forty-eight hundredths of an inch in diameter
plumb through the swindling Umatilla's chest. Forty-five minutes later
he was acquitted by a coroner's jury on the grounds of self-defense and
justifiable homicide--a two-in-one verdict.
"This," concluded the traveling Inspector of Indian Agencies, "was the
finish of just one mentally-burnished buck Indian, and I know of several
others."