logy. That's the art that goes back
and traces the descent of different races of people, leading up from
jelly-fish through monkeys and to the O'Briens. High Jack had took
up that line too, and had read papers about it before all kinds of
riotous assemblies--Chautauquas and Choctaws and chowder-parties, and
such. Having a mutual taste for musty information like that was what
made 'em like each other, I suppose. But I don't know! What they
call congeniality of tastes ain't always it. Now, when Miss Blue
Feather and me was talking together, I listened to her affidavits
about the first families of the Land of Nod being cousins german
(well, if the Germans don't nod, who does?) to the mound-builders of
Ohio with incomprehension and respect. And when I'd tell her about
the Bowery and Coney Island, and sing her a few songs that I'd heard
the Jamaica niggers sing at their church lawn-parties, she didn't look
much less interested than she did when High Jack would tell her that
he had a pipe that the first inhabitants of America originally arrived
here on stilts after a freshet at Tenafly, New Jersey.

"But I was going to tell you more about High Jack.

"About six months ago I get a letter from him, saying he'd been
commissioned by the Minority Report Bureau of Ethnology at Washington
to go down to Mexico and translate some excavations or dig up the
meaning of some shorthand notes on some ruins--or something of that
sort. And if I'd go along he could squeeze the price into the expense
account.

"Well, I'd been holding a napkin over my arm at Chubb's about long
enough then, so I wired High Jack 'Yes'; and he sent me a ticket, and
I met him in Washington, and he had a lot of news to tell me. First
of all, was that Florence Blue Feather had suddenly disappeared from
her home and environments.

"'Run away?' I asked.

"'Vanished,' says High Jack. 'Disappeared like your shadow when
the sun goes under a cloud. She was seen on the street, and then
she turned a corner and nobody ever seen her afterward. The whole
community turned out to look for her, but we never found a clew.'

"'That's bad--that's bad,' says I. 'She was a mighty nice girl, and
as smart as you find em.'

"High Jack seemed to take it hard. I guess he must have esteemed Miss
Blue Feather quite highly. I could see that he'd referred the matter
to the whiskey-jug. That was his weak point--and many another man's.
I've noticed that when a man loses a girl he generall