Brush was a bright fellow and quite a student. He and I sat at the same desk in the school-room, side by side at the dining-table, and we were bed-fellows. From him I learned many things he had gleaned from the superintendent's library, for he was a great reader, and the superintendent, who liked the boy, favored him in various ways, loaned him books to read, and talked with him about them. Of all the stories he used to tell me, and he knew a great many, I liked best to hear him recount the old stories out of the Bible. He was familiar with them all, and told them in a way that delighted me, for he fitted them to my notions. He made them very real. One day he read to me a story, but I could not understand it as well as when he told it in his own simple way, so I asked him not to read them to me any more. The time for the telling of stories was at night after Gray-beard had gone downstairs to his own rooms, having warned us against loud talking. My friend always seemed happy, yet at times, particularly on Saturdays, I noticed he would appear sober, almost melancholy. He did not go home as the rest of us did, and I wondered at this very much. He had a way of disappearing about the time I was ready to start home, so I never had a chance to invite him to my house, as I had often intended to do. I tried a number of times to bring him to speak of himself, but he would throw me off that line of talk, and my curiosity went unsatisfied for a long time. "Say, Brush, where do you live?" I asked one afternoon as we were in the belfry. "You don't go home Saturdays like the rest of us." "There's a man on the top of the hill near Big Elk's grave," he said evasively as he looked through the spy-glass. I could see the man with my naked eyes as he stood on the topmost point against the clear, blue sky. "Take the spy-glass and look at him," continued Brush, as though to put off my question. "Do you live on the other side of that hill?" I persisted. "Frank, I live here, I don't live anywhere else. This is the only home I have," said the boy sadly. "Do your father and mother ask you who you play with at the Mission?" "N-o, they never did, maybe they will sometime, I don't know." "I think they will, that's why I'm going to tell you who I am, then they will know," said Brush, seriously. After a pause he went on, "My father and mother died when I was very small, but I remember my grandfather. He was a very old man. He used to go to your father's house; maybe you have seen him, but I guess you can't remember. He was one of the chiefs, Tae-son' was his name. Once we went to Omaha to buy a lot of things, and coming home we camped just this side of the town; there he died. He was the last relative I had. Now I have no mother, no father, no sister, nothing--no home." He uttered the last word slowly as though thinking. "That's why the Big Seven--that man's gone, you take the spy-glass and look for him."