im when
they stopped at our place, excepting to notice he was kind of slim
and blackhaired and funny complected. But I seen now I orter of looked
closeter. Fur I'll be dad-binged if he weren't an Injun! There he set,
under that there gasoline lamp the wagon was all lit up with, with
moccasins on, and beads and shells all over him, and the gaudiest turkey
tail of feathers rainbowing down from his head you ever see, and a
blanket around him that was gaudier than the feathers. And he shined and
rattled every time he moved.

That wagon was a hull opry house to itself. It was rolled out in front
of Smith's Palace Hotel without the hosses. The front part was filled
with bottles of medicine. The doctor, he begun business by taking out a
long brass horn and tooting on it. They was about a dozen come, but they
was mostly boys. Then him and the Injun picked up some banjoes and sung
a comic song out loud and clear. And they was another dozen or so
come. And they sung another song, and Pop Wilkins, he closed up the
post-office and come over and the other two veterans of the Grand Army
of the Republicans that always plays checkers in there nights come along
with him. But it wasn't much of a crowd, and the doctor he looked sort
o' worried. I had a good place, right near the hind wheel of the wagon
where he rested his foot occasional, and I seen what he was thinking. So
I says to him:

"Doctor Kirby, I guess the crowd is all gone to the circus agin
to-night." And all them fellers there seen I knowed him.

"I guess so, Rube," he says to me. And they all laughed 'cause he called
me Rube, and I felt kind of took down.

Then he lit in to tell about that Injun medicine. First off he told how
he come to find out about it. It was the father of the Injun what
was with him had showed him, he said. And it was in the days of his
youthfulness, when he was wild, and a cowboy on the plains of Oregon.
Well, one night he says, they was an awful fight on the plains of
Oregon, wherever them is, and he got plugged full of bullet holes. And
his hoss run away with him and he was carried off, and the hoss was
going at a dead run, and the blood was running down onto the ground. And
the wolves smelt the blood and took out after him, yipping and yowling
something frightful to hear, and the hoss he kicked out behind and
killed the head wolf and the others stopped to eat him up, and while
they was eating him the hoss gained a quarter of a mile. But they et