m glad I was near," said Herbert, "but it seems to me a terrible
thing to shoot a man. I'm glad it wasn't I that killed him."

"Mebbe it was better for me, as he was my enemy," said Jack Holden. "It
won't trouble my conscience a mite. I don't look upon an Indian as a
man."

"Why not?"

"He's a snake in the grass--a poisonous serpent, that's what I call
him," said Jack Holden.

Herbert shook his head. He couldn't assent to this.

"You feel different, no doubt. You're a tenderfoot. You ain't used to
the ways of these reptiles. You haven't seen what I have," answered
Holden.

"What have you seen?" asked Herbert, judging correctly that Holden
referred to some special experience.

"I'll tell you. You see, I'm an old settler in this Western country.
I've traveled pretty much all over the region beyond the Rockies, and
I've seen a good deal of the red men. I know their ways as well as any
man. Well, I was trampin' once in Montany, when, one afternoon, I and my
pard--he was prospectin'--came to a clearin', and there we saw a sight
that made us all feel sick. It was the smokin' ruins of a log cabin,
which them devils had set on fire. But that wasn't what I referred
to. Alongside there lay six dead bodies--the man, his wife, two boys,
somewhere near your age, a little girl, of maybe ten, and a baby--all
butchered by them savages, layin'--in the hunter's vernacular--in their
gore. It was easy to see how they'd killed the baby, by his broken
skull. They had seized the poor thing by the feet, and swung him against
the side of the house, dashin' out his brains."

Herbert shuddered, and felt sick, as the picture of the ruined home and
the wretched family rose before his imagination.

"It was Indians that did it, of course," proceeded Holden. "They're born
savage, and such things come natural to them."

"Are there no good Indians?" asked the boy.

"There may be," answered Jack Holden, doubtfully, "though I haven't seen
many. They're as scarce as plums in a boardin' house puddin', I reckon."

I present this as Jack Holden's view, not mine. He had the prejudices
of the frontier, and frontiersmen are severe judges of their Indian
neighbors. They usually look at but one side of the picture, and are
not apt to take into consideration the wrongs which the Indians
have undeniably received. There is another extreme, however, and the
sentimentalists who deplore Indian wrongs, and represent them as a
brave, suffering and oppressed