coffee from crockery cups? It
just beats Father Dixon's Indian stories all to pieces."

Oscar and Charlie, however, were disposed to think very lightly of
this sort of Indian civilization. Oscar said: "If these red men were
either one thing or the other, I wouldn't mind it. But they have shed
the gaudy trappings of the wild Indian, and their new clothes do not
fit very well. As Grandfather Bryant used to say, they are neither
fish nor flesh, nor good red herring. They are a mighty uninteresting
lot."

"Well, they are on the way to a better state of things than they have
known, anyhow," said Charlie. "The next generation will see them
higher up, I guess. But I must say that these farms don't look very
thrifty, somehow. Indians are a lazy lot; they don't like work. Did
you notice how all those big fellows at dinner sat down with us and
the stage passengers, and the poor women had to wait on everybody?
That's Indian."

Uncle Charlie laughed, and said that the boys had expected to find
civilized Indians waiting on the table, decked out with paint and
feathers, and wearing deerskin leggings and such like.

"Wait until we get out on the frontier," said he, "and then you will
see wild Indians, perhaps, or 'blanket Indians,' anyhow."

"Blanket Indians?" said Sandy, with an interrogation point in his
face.

"Yes; that's what the roving and unsettled bands are called by white
folks. Those that are on reservations and earning their own living, or
a part of it,--for the Government helps them out considerably,--are
called town Indians; those that live in wigwams, or tepees, and rove
from place to place, subsisting on what they can catch, are blanket
Indians. They tell me that there are wild Indians out on the western
frontier. But they are not hostile; at least, they were not, at last
accounts. The Cheyennes have been rather uneasy, they say, since the
white settlers began to pour into the country. Just now I am more
concerned about the white Missourians than I am about the red
aborigines."

They were still on the Delaware reservation when they camped that
evening, and the boys went into the woods to gather fuel for their
fire.

They had not gone far, when Sandy gave a wild whoop of alarm, jumping
about six feet backward as he yelled, "A rattlesnake!" Sure enough, an
immense snake was sliding out from under a mass of brush that the boy
had disturbed as he gathered an armful of dry branches and twigs.
Dropping his burden