d voice trembled with unearthly conviction.

"Well, I guess you are. I guess you've got pretty far along," said the
frontier cynic. He tilted his chair back and smiled at the child whose
primitive brain he had tampered with so easily. The child stood looking
at him with intent black eyes. "Better wait, Cheschapah. Come again.
Medicine heap better after a while."

The Indian's quick ear caught the insincerity without understanding it.
"You give me that quick!" he said, suddenly terrible.

"Oh, all right, Cheschapah. You know more medicine than me."

"Yes, I know more."

The white man brought a pot of scarlet paint, and the Indian's staring
eyes contracted. Kinney took the battered cavalry sabre in his hand, and
set its point in the earth floor of the cabin. "Stand back," he said, in
mysterious tones, and Cheschapah shrank from the impending sorcery. Now
Kinney had been to school once, in his Eastern childhood, and there had
committed to memory portions of Shakespeare, Mrs. Hemans, and other
poets out of a Reader. He had never forgotten a single word of any of
them, and it now occurred to him that for the purposes of an incantation
it would be both entertaining for himself and impressive to Cheschapah
if he should recite "The Battle of Hohenlinden." He was drawing squares
and circles with the point of the sabre.

"No," he said to himself, "that piece won't do. He knows too much
English. Some of them words might strike him as bein' too usual, and
he'd start to kill me, and spoil the whole thing. 'Munich' and
'chivalry' are snortin', but 'sun was low' ain't worth a damn. I
guess--"

He stopped guessing, for the noon recess at school came in his mind,
like a picture, and with it certain old-time preliminaries to the game
of tag.

"'Eeny, meeny, money, my,'"

said Kinney, tapping himself, the sabre, the paint-pot, and Cheschapah
in turn, one for each word. The incantation was begun. He held the sabre
solemnly upright, while Cheschapah tried to control his excited
breathing where he stood flattened against the wall.

"'Butter, leather, boney, stry;
Hare-bit, frost-neck,
Harrico, barrico, whee, why, whoa, whack!'

"You're it, Cheschapah." After that the weapon was given its fresh coat
of paint, and Cheschapah went away with his new miracle in the dark.

"He is it," mused Kinney, grave, but inwardly lively. He was one of
those sincere artists who need no popular commendation. "And whoever he
d