this hiding-place? But we could not do it. Try as we might,
the hidden path leading up, or down, baffled us.

After Jean Pahusca came into our school we had a new interest and for a
time we forgot that tantalizing river wall below town. Jean was
irregular in his attendance and his temper. He learned quickly, for an
Indian. Sometimes he was morose and silent; sometimes he was affable and
kind, chatting among us like one of our own; and sometimes he found the
white man's fire-water. Then he murdered as he went. He was possessed of
a demon to kill, kill the moment he became drunk. Every living thing in
his way had to flee or perish then. He would stop in his mad chase to
crush the life out of a sleeping cat, or to strike at a bird or a
chicken. Whiskey to him meant death, as we learned to our sorrow.
Nobody knew where he lived. He dressed like an Osage but he was
supposed to make his home with the Kaws, whose reservation was much
nearer to us. Sometimes in the cool weather he slept in our sheds. In
warm weather he lay down on the ground wherever he chose to sleep. There
was a fascination about him unlike all the other Indians who came up to
the village, many of whom we knew. He could be so gentle and winning in
his manner at times, one forgot he was an Indian. But the spirit of the
Red Man was ever present to overcome the strange European mood in a
moment.

"He's no Osage, that critter ain't," Cam Gentry said to a group on his
tavern veranda one annuity day when the tribes had come to town for
their quarterly allowances. "He's second cousin on his father's side to
some French missionary, you bet your life. He's got a gait like a Jessut
priest. An' he's not Osage on't other side, neither. I'll bet his mother
was a Kiowa, an' that means his maternal grandad was a rattlesnake, even
if his paternal grandpop was a French markis turned religious an' gone
a-missionaryin' among the red heathen. You dig fur enough into that
buck's hide an' you'll find cussedness big as a sheep, I'm tellin' you."

"Where does he live?" inquired my father.

"Lord knows!" responded Cam. "Down to the Kaws' nests, I reckon."

"He was cuttin' east along the Fingal Creek bluff after he'd made off to
the southwest, the other night, when I was after the cows," broke in
O'mie, who was sitting on the lowest step listening with all his ears.
"Was cuttin' straight to the river. Only that's right by the Hermit's
Cave an' he couldn't cross to the Osages there