?" 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.

"Well," I said, picking the thistle burrs off my trousers, "let us sit
down for a spell, shall we?" To my surprise, they consented. We