prowess.

"I'd send for Pa," Ma Wagor said dismally, "but what good would he do?
And one of us has got to be left to prove up the claim." It was
unlikely, according to Ma, that anyone in that cabin would survive. But
as the night wore on everything across the trail became quiet and at
last we threw ourselves across the bed, exhausted. We woke next morning
to find our cowboy gone and the Indians cooking breakfast.

Two leather-skinned men with hair hanging loose over their shoulders and
faces painted in red and copper hues led a big-boned horse up to the
door and walked into the store. They pointed to the shelves, held up ten
fingers, then pointed to the horse. They wanted to trade it for ten
dollars' worth of groceries.

Ida Mary did not bother to look at the horse. She traded. The last thing
that would have occurred to her at that moment was to disagree with any
wishes the Indians might express. We found out later that the old mare
was stone-blind and locoed.

Within a week we had the corral full of horses--the lame, the halt and
the blind. We would have traded the whole store for anything that the
Indians wanted, to get rid of them.

Sourdough, who belonged to the Scotty Phillips outfit over on the Indian
lands, had ridden straight on to do night-herd duty. Every cowpuncher,
it seemed, must play at least one trick on the tenderfeet.

Then one day a handsomely built young buck, straight as an arrow, walked
into the print shop. "How Kola!" he said, and then introduced himself as
Joe Two-Hawk. He was a college graduate, it appeared, and he explained
that "How Kola" was the friendly greeting of the Sioux, a welcome to the
two white girls who ran the settlement.

Many of these young Indians went East to Indian colleges, acquiring,
along with their education, a knowledge of civilized ways to which they
adapted themselves with amazing rapidity. On returning to the
reservations, however, in many cases, perhaps in most, they discarded
one by one, as though they had never been, the ways of the white man,
and reverted to their primitive customs and ways of life. Nor should
they be too thoughtlessly condemned for it. Among civilized peoples the
same urge for an escape from responsibility exists, thwarted often
enough merely by necessity, or by the pressure of convention and public
opinion. The Indians who have reverted to type, discarded the ways of
civilization for a tepee and primitive uncleanliness, follow the path of