To one listening, drowsed with the intense sunshine, the _buzzle_ and mutter and snarl of the gossiping Omahas seemed the grotesque echoes from a vanished age. Between the fierce dazzle of the sun and the sharply contrasting blue shade, there was but a line of division; yet a thousand years lay between one gazing in the sun and those dozing in the shadow. It was as if God had flung down a bit of the Young World’s twilight into the midst of the Old World’s noon. Here lounged the masterpiece of the toiling centuries—a Yankee. There sat the remnant of a race as primitive as Israel. Yet the white man looked on with the contempt of superiority. Before ten o’clock everybody had arrived and his family with him. A little group, composed of the Indian Agent, the Agency Physician, the Mission Preacher, and a newspaper man, down from the city for reportorial purposes, waited and chatted, sitting upon a ragged patch of available shadow. “These Omahas are an exceptional race,” the preacher was saying in his ministerial tone of voice; “an exceptional race!” The newspaper man mopped his face, lit a cigarette and nodded assent with a hidden meaning twinkling in his eye. “Quite exceptional!” he said, tossing his head in the direction of an unusually corpulent bunch of steaming, sweating, bronze men and women. “God, like some lesser master-musicians, has not confined himself to grand opera, it seems!” He took a long pull at his cigarette, and his next words came out in a cloud of smoke. “This particular creation savours somewhat of opera bouffe!” With severe unconcern the preacher mended the broken thread of his discourse. “Quite an exceptional race in many ways. The Omaha is quite as honest as the white man.” “That is a truism!” The pencil-pusher drove this observation between the minister’s words like a wedge. “In his natural state he was much more so,” uninterruptedly continued the preacher; he was used to continuous discourse. “I have been told by many of the old men that in the olden times an Indian could leave his tepee for months at a time, and on his return would find his most valuable possessions untouched. I tell you, gentlemen, the Indian is like a prairie flower that has been transplanted from the blue sky and the summer sun and the pure winds into the steaming, artificial atmosphere of the hothouse! A glass roof is not the blue sky! Man’s talent is not God’s genius! That is why you are looking at a perverted growth. “Look into an Indian’s face and observe the ruins of what was once manly dignity, indomitable energy, masterful prowess! When I look upon one of these faces, I have the same thoughts as, when travelling in Europe, I looked upon the ruins of Rome. “Everywhere broken arches, fallen columns, tumbled walls! Yet through these as through a mist one can discern the magnificence of the living city. So in looking upon one of these faces, which are merely ruins in another sense. They were once as noble, as beautiful as——”