Jack the Young Cowboy: An Eastern Boy's Experiance on a Western Round-upGrinnell, George Bird
General
Jack the Young Cowboy: An Eastern Boy's Experiance on a Western Round-up
Grinnell, George Bird
Cowboys -- Juvenile fiction; Western stories
"That Indian sure had plenty of sand. He walked down toward these
people; and when they saw him, one of them walked up to him and stuck
out his hand and took the Indian's hand and moved it up and down. The
Indian looked at the white man and at the white man's hand, but he had
no idea what this meant, and did nothing. Presently other white men
came up to him, and the Indian discovered that they were people like
himself, except that they had different voices and different colored
skin and hair.
"After a while, when the Indians in the timber saw no harm had come to
their chief, they came out a few at a time and went down toward the
white people. The white people talked to them and made signs to them,
but the Indians could not understand what they meant. At last, however,
the whites managed to make some of the Indians understand that they
wanted them to go into the house with them, and a number of them went
in; and as some time went by without anything terrible happening, all
the Indians began to take courage.
"In this house there were a great many wonderful things. The white
people carried knives in their belts and showed the Indians how these
would cut. The Indians were nearly tickled to death with the knives.
Then a great big white man showed them an ax, and while they stood by
he cut a big log in two in a very short time; and when the Indians saw
the chips fly they began to understand the strange beaver work that
they had seen.
"One of the white men took down from the wall something that the
Indians thought was a long, straight stick but when the man showed it
to them they could see that while part of it was made of wood a part
was made of a hard black stone. The white man kept making signs about
this stick, but they didn't know what he meant. Pretty soon the man
took a white cow's horn, and out of it poured some black sand into
his hand and poured this into a hole at the end of the stick. Then he
made a little ball of grass and pushed this into the hole with another
stick; then out of a bag he took something that was round and heavy
and put that into the hole, and pushed down some more grass; then he
poured some of the black sand into the side of the stick. The Indians
watched him do all these things, and of course had no idea as to what
it all meant. After he had finished doing these things, the white man
made signs to the Indians and made a great noise with his mouth, and
pointed to the stick. He put the stick to his shoulder, holding it out
in front of him, and made motions of many kinds. Presently he gave the
stick to one of the Indians, and put his finger on a little piece of
stone sticking out from beneath it. When the Indian touched this under
part, the stick made a terrible noise and a big smoke, and flew out of
the Indian's hands, and he nearly fell down.
"All the Indians were very much scared, and some of them fell down, but
all the white men laughed and nodded, and made signs, but of course the
Indians did not understand them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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