Purty soon every boy in town would be out there, kind o' hanging around,
to see what a Injun camp was like. And the farmers that went into and
out of town always stopped and passed the time of day, and the Injun
camp got the hull town all worked up as a usual thing; and the doctor,
he done well, fur when night come every one would be on hand. Looey
and me, every time we went into town, had on our Injun suits, and the
doctor, he wondered why he hadn't never thought up that scheme before.
Sometimes, when they was lots of people ailing in a town, and they
hadn't been no show fur quite a while, we'd stay five or six days, and
make a good clean-up. The doctor, he sent to Chicago several times fur
alcohol in barrels, 'cause he was selling it so fast he had to make new
Sagraw. And he had to get more and more bottles, and a hull satchel full
of new Sagraw labels printed.
And all the time the doctor was learning me education. And shucks! they
wasn't nothing so hard about it oncet you'd got started in to reading
things. I jest natcherally took to print like a duck to water, and
inside of a month I was reading nigh everything that has ever been
wrote. He had lots of books with him and every time a new sockdologer of
a word come along and I learnt how to spell her and where she orter fit
in to make sense it kind o' tickled me all over. And many's the time
afterward, when me and the doctor had lost track of each other, and they
was quite a spell people got to thinking I was a tramp, I've went into
these here Andrew Carnegie libraries in different towns jest as much to
see if they had anything fitten to read as fur to keep warm.
Well, we went easing over toward the Indiany line, and we was having a
purty good time. They wasn't no work to do you could call really hard,
and they was plenty of vittles. Afternoons we'd lazy around the camp and
swap stories and make medicine if we needed a batch, and josh back and
forth with the people that hung around, and loaf and doze and smoke; or
mebby do a little fishing if we was nigh a crick.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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