him
up and they was gaining agin, fur the smell of human blood was on the
plains of Oregon, he says, and the sight of his mother's face when she
ast him never to be a cowboy come to him in the moonlight, and he knowed
that somehow all would yet be well, and then he must of fainted and he
knowed no more till he woke up in a tent on the plains of Oregon. And
they was an old Injun bending over him and a beautiful Injun maiden was
feeling of his pulse, and they says to him:

"Pale face, take hope, fur we will doctor you with Siwash Injun Sagraw,
which is nature's own cure fur all diseases."

They done it. And he got well. It had been a secret among them there
Injuns fur thousands and thousands of years. Any Injun that give away
the secret was killed and rubbed off the rolls of the tribe and buried
in disgrace upon the plains of Oregon. And the doctor was made a blood
brother of the chief, and learnt the secret of that medicine. Finally
he got the chief to see as it wasn't Christian to hold back that
there medicine from the world no longer, and the chief, his heart was
softened, and he says to go.

"Go, my brother," he says, "and give to the pale faces the medicine
that has been kept secret fur thousands and thousands of years among the
Siwash Injuns on the plains of Oregon."

And he went. It wasn't that he wanted to make no money out of that there
medicine. He could of made all the money he wanted being a doctor in the
reg'lar way. But what he wanted was to spread the glad tidings of good
health all over this fair land of ourn, he says.

Well, sir, he was a talker, that there doctor was, and he knowed more
religious sayings and poetry along with it, than any feller I ever
hearn. He goes on and he tells how awful sick people can manage to get
and never know it, and no one else never suspicion it, and live along
fur years and years that-a-way, and all the time in danger of death. He
says it makes him weep when he sees them poor diluted fools going around
and thinking they is well men, talking and laughing and marrying and
giving in to marriage right on the edge of the grave. He sees dozens of
'em in every town he comes to. But they can't fool him, he says. He can
tell at a glance who's got Bright's Disease in their kidneys and who
ain't. His own father, he says, was deathly sick fur years and years and
never knowed it, and the knowledge come on him sudden like, and he died.
That was before Siwash Injun Sagraw was ever fo