ld skinflint of a farmer who'd have him up at four in the
morning and keep him on the go until eight at night.

"Then what other way?" asked Dinky-Dunk.

"You leave it to me," I retorted. I made a bluff of saying it bravely
enough, but I inwardly decided that instead of sixteen yards of fresh
chintz I'd have to be satisfied with five yards. Poverty, after all,
is not a picturesque thing. But I didn't intend to be poor, I
protested to my troubled soul, as I went at that Harris Ranch wickiup,
tooth and nail, while Iroquois Annie kept an eye on Dinkie and the
Twins.

These same Twins, I can more than ever see, are going to be somewhat
of a brake on the wheels of industry. I have even been feeding on
"slops," of late, to the end that Poppsy and Pee-Wee may thrive. And
already I see sex-differences asserting themselves. Pee-Wee is a bit
of a stoic, while his sister shows a tendency to prove a bit of a
squealer. But Poppsy is much the daintier feeder of the two. I'll
probably have to wean them both, however, before many more weeks slip
by. As soon as we get settled in our new shack and I can be sure of a
one-cow supply of milk I'll begin a bottle-feed once in every
twenty-four hours. Dinky-Dunk says I ought to take a tip from the
Indian mother, who sometimes nurses her babe until he's two and three
years old. I asked Ikkie--as Dinkie calls Iroquois Annie--about this
and Ikkie says the teepee squaw has no cow's milk and has to keep on
the move, so she feeds him breast-milk until he's able to eat meat.
Ikkie informs me that she has seen a papoose turn away from its
mother's breast to take a puff or two at a pipe. From which I assume
that the noble Red Man learns to smoke quite early in life.

Ikkie has also been enlightening me on other baby-customs of her
ancestors, explaining that it was once the habit for a mother to name
her baby for the first thing seen after its birth. That, I told
Dinky-Dunk, was probably why there were so many "Running Rabbits," and
"White Pups" and "Black Calfs" over on the Reservation. And that
started me maun enlarging on the names of Indians he'd known, the most
elongated of which, he acknowledged, was probably "The-Man-Who-Gets-Up-
In-The-Middle-Of-The-Night-To-Feed-Oats-To-His-Pony," while the most
descriptive was "Slow-To-Come-Over-The-Hill," though "Shot-At-Many-Times"
was not without value, and "Long-Time-No-See-Him," as the appellative for
a disconsolate young squaw, carried a slight hint