LITTLE BIG MAN

CHAPTER 9 Sin

OF COURSE I HAD to go to school there in that town, and it may surprise you to hear I didn’t mind it much. Sitting on a hard seat for long hours was the worst part, and I wasn’t thrilled none by the sour old spinster who taught us, and it was also embarrassing to be put with the tiny children, for I never had much learning up to that point. I could read a little before I went with the Indians, and I could count, and I understood that George Washington had been President though I couldn’t have said when.

Let me just say I labored diligently at my studies, and Mrs. Pendrake tutored me at home, and by spring I had advanced in reading to where I could do the work of twelve- or thirteen-year-olds and in composition right well though spelling was never my strong point, but in arithmetic I stayed virtually a baby. But that was ever so many year ago and I didn’t go to school long, so if the man who is listening to this story of mine copies it down the way I am saying it, you will read the memoirs of a uncultivated person, that’s for sure.

The Pendrakes must have talked some to each other in my presence, but I swear I can’t remember any such occasion. As I see them back over the years, we’re sitting to supper in the dining room, the Reverend at the head of the table, Mrs. at the foot, me along the side, Lucy putting down bowl after bowl of steaming food. After grace, Pendrake’s voice not loud but so penetrating that I reckon it could soften tough meat, he’d dig into his chuck. He was a prodigious eater, outdoing even a Cheyenne in that respect, for while an Indian will stuff himself most wonderful there is much of the time that he has to go hungry; it evens out over the course of a month, say, to somewhat less than the average intake of a white man who never misses his three square.

But Pendrake laid into it day in and day out, and I’m going to tell you what he’d eat on any one of them, for you won’t have an idea of that man without knowledge of his appetite.

For breakfast Lucy would fry him six eggs, a great mass of potatoes, and a steak about the size of his two giant hands put together. By the time that was chawed up and had been washed down to his belly with a couple quarts of coffee, she’d deliver the griddle cakes, ten or twelve surmounted by a hunk of butter big as an apple and dripping with molasses. For lunch he’d eat two entire chickens with stuffing, potatoes, couple vegetables, five pieces of bread, and half a pie swimming in cream. In the afternoon he’d make calls on sick parishioners, and they wouldn’t never be so under the weather that they couldn’t see to it he got an enormous hunk of cake or a dozen cookies along with coffee or tea.

Then came supper. He’d drink a bowl of soup into which he broke so much bread it was more solid than liquid. Next would be a platter of fish, then a huge roast of beef which he would singlehanded reduce to the bone after me and Mrs. Pendrake had maybe a slice each; a mountain of potatoes, a swamp of greens, and boiled turnips and black-eye peas and steamed carrots, four cups of coffee and about five pounds of pudding, and if there was any pie left over from lunch, he’d drive that home as well.

Yet for all that gluttony he was the neatest eater I ever seen. He wouldn’t put a finger on any type of food but bread; for the rest he used knife and fork as nicely as a woman does her needlework. And when he was through the plate shone as though fresh washed, and such bones as was left rose in a little polished stack in an extra bowl he had Lucy lay by for that purpose. It was a real show to watch him take a meal, and I got some pleasure from filling in the time that way, left over after I satisfied my own appetite.

Mrs. Pendrake only picked at her own victual, which was no wonder because she didn’t do no work for which she’d have to eat much. Now I was used to Indian women who stayed busy from dawn until they rolled into their buffalo hides, and before that, my own Ma who even with the help of my sisters complained the day wasn’t long enough in which she could finish her duties. But Mrs. P. had Lucy to cook and there was another colored girl who come in frequent to clean though didn’t live in, and that Lavender, he did all the gardening and run errands and whatnot outdoors. So here was this perfectly healthy white woman, in the prime of life, with nothing to do except for the hour or so she spent in helping me with my lessons when I come home from school.

Now having been reared by savages, I had manners that may not have been polished but they was considerate. I certainly didn’t step up to Mrs. Pendrake and say: “It strikes me you are useless around here.” But that’s what I thought, and it wasn’t no criticism for I liked her and helped her when I could. She had this idea of being my Ma, so to oblige I’d pretend now and again to need mothering.

In the first months of school I took a bit of jeering from the other boys my age for studying with the ten-year-olds. I let it go awhile, and you know how that works: they give it to me stronger when they believed I had no defense, and throwed in some stuff about “dirty Indian.”

Finally the whole bunch was waiting one afternoon at the corner of an alley on the route home from school. As I come along, they begun to taunt me for being an Indian, which had a unjust side you might not get until you realize they thought I had been captured and kept prisoner for five year. You might say I deserved their needling more than they knew, but I don’t think they should be forgive on the basis of accident.

I kept on walking without comment until one of them stepped out before me. He was about five foot ten at sixteen years of age, and had a few pimples.

“There ain’t a day,” he says, “when I can’t lick a dirty Indin.”

I was willing to believe that when it come to fisticuffs, which the Cheyenne didn’t practice. Indian boys wrestle some, but as I have indicated to a sufficiency, they don’t have much reason to fight among their friends when the enemy is generally just beyond the next buffalo wallow. And when they tangle with the enemy, it is not to show him up or make him eat dust, but rather to kill him altogether and rip off the top of his head.

Thus I just looked at this boy in contempt and pushed by him, and he hit me with his loutish fist underneath my right ear. I must have staggered off to the bias for eight or ten feet, being his hand was large and on the end of a weighty arm, and dropped my books along the way. Them other lads hooted, cawed, and whistled. I hadn’t had any action now since the saber charge and wasn’t used to it in town like that, a person tending to go by the custom of where ever he’s stuck, so I clumb onto my knees slow, thinking, and that fellow run over and swung his boot in the direction of my hindquarters.

That puts a man off balance: he should have knowed it if he was going around kicking people, but he learned it then. I just rolled under the lifted foot and pulled the other leg loose. He fell like a bag of sugar. I stuck my hoof into his neck and got the scalping knife from under my shirt.…

No, I didn’t even scratch him with it. For that matter, I could have let him suffocate had I not lifted my foot off his neck eventually, for it choked his wind and he was turning purple. But I wasn’t no Indian, and figured I had proved it by putting my knife away, gathering up my books, and going on.

When I got home the angle of my jaw there below the ear was swoll as if I was squirreling a cheekful of nuts. Mrs. Pendrake saw it right off, and says: “Ah, Jack, I must get you to the dentist.”

I says no, it wasn’t no wisdom tooth. We was in the parlor then, where we always did the tutoring although it was far from the best place in the house for that purpose because you could hear the Reverend muttering in his study nearby, but I guess she supposed I liked it.

Then what could it ever be, she asks. She was wearing a rich blue that day, which become her a great deal, especially when her eyes in sadness took on the exact shade of the dress. Late in the year the buffalo grass turns tawny and when you are climbing an elevation with the sun slanting on it, that’s about the shade of her hair. We was sitting as usual side by side on that plush loveseat, with me as far away as I could get, on account of next to that fine lady I always worried that I still stunk though while I was with the Pendrakes I took a bath every Saturday whether I needed it or not.

“A fight,” says I. “A boy hit me there.”

She formed an O with her mouth, which stayed half open so you could see just an ivory trace beyond her pink lip, and she put her cool hand on the back of mine. She was trying to be a mother, see, but didn’t really know how. For fighting, a Ma will swat at you if you ain’t hurt, or doctor you if you are. But Mrs. P. figured the thing was to be sad, for she had an ideal conception of everything.

Here’s what I mean when I said I helped her: I let my eyes fall to the swell of her bosom, and I lifted her hand to my jaw.

“How it thumps,” she says. “Poor Jack.” And you know how them things go, I couldn’t tell if it was mostly her or me, but soon I had my face against her breasts and my thumps was alternating with those from her heart.

I expect you are thinking what a nasty little fellow I was. Well, believe what you like, but remember Mrs. Pendrake was only about ten years older than me. It was hard to think of her as a Ma, but at the same time I never before that moment figured her as a girl if you know what I mean. When it came to idealism, I had quite a bit of my own. I have told you the Cheyenne was prigs, and that fighting takes the same kind of energy as sex. It’s peace that is the horny time. Most of them fat merchants in that town was real sex fiends compared to an Indian brave. And them other white boys my age was already slipping into brothels or laying the maids.

With the inactivity I was undergoing and all, and especially that studying-I don’t know much about scholars but I should judge them a carnal lot, because in my experience with the life of the mind, though I was interested in it, after a bit a tension would build up owing to the invisible nature of that which was studied. You can’t see it nor put your hands on it, yet it claims your absolute attention. It’d make me nervous in time. Then I would think of girls as a relief.

There you have the background to this incident, before which I never had an indecent thought towards Mrs. Pendrake. And you can get off the hook now, for nothing else happened here. She was a fine lady: if I hadn’t knowed that otherwise, I could feel it in the hardness of her bosom, which if anything hurt my sore jaw. She was all laced up in whalebone. If Buffalo Wallow Woman pulled you against herself, it had been like sinking into a pillow.

For another, at that moment a little delegation showed up at the house: that boy I had fought, his Pa, and a town constable, ready to hang me, I expect, for assault with a deadly weapon.

Though Mrs. P. as a mother left something to be desired, in this type of situation she couldn’t be bettered. In polite relations, as you might call them, she was the Queen of England.

First place, she kept them people in the hall while me and her continued to sit upon the loveseat. I don’t mean she said Stay out there; she just had that force of will. So the constable, a beefy individual, filled the whole doorway and if the boy’s Pa wanted to say something, had to step aside. They was always bumping into one another. We never saw the boy at all.

“Missus,” the constable says, “if it be discommoding to you, why they ain’t no reason why we cain’t come back another time.” He waited for a bit, but Mrs. Pendrake never answered such commentary. “Well then, I got a lad here, Lucas English, son of Horace English what owns the feed store-”

“Is that Mr. English behind you, Mr. Travis?” asks Mrs. P., and then the constable and English, a fellow in vest and sleeve-garters, do that little dance of interchange and Travis drops his helmet, and English says: “Yes’m, and there ain’t nothing personally involved in this matter, Mrs. Reverend, for I been obliged to the Reverend for many years for supplying his wants in the way of feed-”

Mrs. Pendrake says there with her cold smile: “I believe you refer to the wants of the Reverend Pendrake’s animal, do you not, Mr. English, and are not suggesting that Mr. Pendrake eats oats.”

English gasps with false laughter, which gets his hoof further down his throat, and the constable pushes him away and steps into the doorframe.

“It’s like this, Mrs.,” says he. “There seems to be a fight between two lads. One lad’s got him a knife, and according to the statement of the first, says he will get him the other’s scalp with it like the redskin practice.” He grins. “Which of course ain’t within the law.”

Mrs. Pendrake says: “The poet tells us to err is human, Mr. Travis. I’m sure the English boy did not intend to use his knife on my dear Jack, but simply to make a childish threat. If Jack can forgive him, I shall not prefer charges.” She looks at me and asks: “Dear?”

“Sure,” I says, feeling real queer to hear her call me that for the first time.

“Ah then, Mr. Travis,” Mrs. P. says. “So far as I am concerned, there’s an end to it.” And thanked him, and called for Lucy to let them out.

Now I figured after that handsome performance I owed Mrs. Pendrake something. Oh, I suppose even at the time I knew she had never done it for me, though it was obvious to a clever woman like her that I had the knife. She just wasn’t going to let no man take her to task even indirectly. The fact I belonged to her gave me absolute immunity, the way she saw it. I had never before known a woman, white or red, who had that type of opinion of herself, which was power though you might say used negatively. Had it been used in the positive fashion, she’d have been manly, but nobody could ever take Mrs. Pendrake for anything but 110 per cent female though you might not confuse her with your Ma.

But right now, I thought I could please her by pretending, anyway, to make that very confusion. It might have been play-acting on her part to call me “dear,” but I’ll tell you I liked it in front of those slobs.

So I says: “Mother”-“Mother” is what I says-“Mother, which is the poet what wrote that particular motto?”

Well sir, the word did a lot for her, though I might not have pronounced it with much confidence this first time. Of course she didn’t let on, but went to a bookcase and brought back a volume.

“Mr. Alexander Pope,” she says, “who also wrote: ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.’ ”

She read me some of that man’s verse, which sounded like the trotting of a horse if you never paid attention to the words or didn’t understand most of them like me. What I did savvy seemed right opinionated, like that fellow had the last word on everything.

My only complaint was that for a poet he wasn’t any too romantic. Now you take a boy who lived my kind of life, you’d figure him to be about as realistic as any, if not altogether cynical. That may be so, but it never applied to women, or at least not to beautiful white women who was useless for practical purposes.

I fell into an infatuation for Mrs. Pendrake right then. I guess even at my present time of life, I am still weak on the subject of elegant and gracious ladies. Authority is also involved, as in her handling that constable and feed merchant, and having a knowledge of fine aspects, like the way she held the works of Mr. Pope, with her head inclined against the afternoon sun from the west window so that the margins of her nose and forehead was crystalline and her hair old gold. She always knowed the right thing so far as civilization went, like an Indian knows it for savagery. And I saw then that uselessness was a necessary part of it. If you put such a woman to work, you’d lose that which was her special value, like if you made a hitching post of a statue.

I figured to have got the idea of white life, right then. It hadn’t ought to do with the steam engine or arithmetic or even Mr. Pope’s verse. Its aim was to turn out a Mrs. Pendrake.

I said infatuation, but you can call it love, and directly I was awed by it and moved over to my end of the bench again.

Just about then, while I was sliding my butt across the plush, in comes the Reverend from the door behind us which connected with his study. He had stopped rumbling there when the men had showed up. Now he moves ponderously around in front of us, and for some moments his wife kept reading whatever poem she was on then, so he waited till she was done. Then he spoke to me.

“Boy,” he said, real kindly. “Boy, it is my opinion that you have labored earnestly at your studies in these three months since coming to this house.” The next thing he done was to falter and stroke his beard. The wonders of this day was never-ceasing. After that first afternoon, he had no more spoke to me than to Mrs. Pendrake in my hearing.

“I do not want you to have the misapprehension,” he finally said, “that we here see life as all duty. Therefore tomorrow, which is Saturday, and if Mrs. Pendrake does not require you and if you are favorably disposed to the project, I should be willing to take you fishing.”

Now, it being November of the year and while not winter as yet the weather was cold and damp and not the time any sane person would have fished for sport, I lost no time in accepting the invite. Add to the other reasons against so doing that I really couldn’t stand the Reverend except when he was eating, and you won’t understand why I did until I say that if he seemed to be in his wife’s debt, I had just now got to feeling in his.

So there we was, out to the creek next day in fairly miserable weather where the air was like a big sponge full of water and no sooner had we reached the stream when someone squeezed it and rain begun to pour down. We had come out in a buckboard, with Lavender driving and only he had sense enough to bring protection against the inclemency, for he had a big toe that was infallible as a weather gauge.

I could see right off that the Reverend didn’t know anything about fishing from the way he put a doughball on the hook-that was what we used, for Lavender claimed he couldn’t find worms in late November. And the day was sufficiently unpleasant to drive off a fellow who was crazy for the sport. But Pendrake had said he was going fishing, and that’s what he fixed to do, the water swirling around his hatbrim and running off his black coat. He was dressed in his usual, by the way, with no provision for leisure.

Lavender offered us his umbrella in insincere fashion, for which I didn’t blame him, but Pendrake said no, he didn’t require it, so Lavender kept it over himself and put a blanket underneath a tree and set there and looked at an illustrated paper someone had give him though he couldn’t read, but seemed to get more out of it than those who could, for he was laughing at it.

Me and the Reverend went down to the bank a ways along by some willows which was now brown and he says: “What’s your opinion of this location, boy?”

“It’s as good as any,” says I. My hair was all matted from the rain and water coursed down my cheeks; it seemed ridiculous in view of what we was supposed to be doing to have a good time, but I never minded the soaking as such, having been wetted down plenty as an Indian inside as well as outside the lodge, for tepee skins generally leak after they been in use for a while, especially at the seams.

But here he looked at me out of that black beard and said with genuine feeling, for which his voice was less ponderous: “Ah, boy, you’re getting wet.” With that he drew a big handkerchief and wiped my face right gently.

I guess I can’t explain it, but that was one of the truly kindest things anybody’s done for me, ever. It didn’t matter none that I wasn’t distressed or that his sudden discovery of the rain after it poured some minutes might have been foolish. He put his big hand on my damp shoulder and looked sorry out of all proportion. I hadn’t seen him straight ever before. His eyes was hazel and didn’t have too much of a lid. Without the beard he would have looked to lose much of his force, though he surely had enormous strength of muscle.

“We don’t have to stay if you don’t want to,” he said. “We can go on back. It was an unfortunate idea.” He shook his head like a buffalo bull and droplets flung off the beard and he turned away and stared at the muddy creek, and says: “He sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”

“Who?” asks I, for I didn’t know.

“Why, our Heavenly Father, boy,” says Pendrake and, closing up grim again, throws his line in the water, which was so disturbed by the pelting rain that the bobber was dancing all the time and you would never tell from it if you caught a whale.

The Indians has always fished with a spear, which is to me a more interesting endeavor than hook and line. Also the rain was now getting to me: I had softened up in only a month or so. However, I didn’t want to hurt the Reverend’s feelings, so I presented him a bright suggestion.

Acting on it, he had Lavender run the wagon down on the bank, which was wide enough and flat for such accommodation, unhitch the horse and take him back under the tree, and we crawled beneath the buckboard, letting our fishpoles stick out, and thus had a roof against the elements.

Any fool could have figured this out, but the Reverend was greatly impressed by what he called my “acumen.” He seemed relieved that I was no longer getting soaked. As to himself, it was more complicated: you see, his trouble was he couldn’t allow himself any pleasure aside from eating. He would have preferred to be dripping and uncomfortable-that’s the only reason I could dream up as to why we come in the open wagon at all rather than the closed buggy which he also owned. I never could study out why Lavender was there, except that maybe the Reverend was uneasy with me by himself.

It was a tight squeeze for a man of his bulk underneath the buckboard. We set there a time smelling of wet wool, during which the current intermingled our lines and swept them useless into the bank and no doubt soon melted off the doughballs.

At length Pendrake said: “Boy, from what you asked before about the rain, I understand my delinquency.” He was cramped in there with his beard against his rising belly and looking on to the stream through the sheet of water coming from above.

“I have left you to live in the ignorance of an animal, though I have been specifically charged with leading men to a knowledge of God. Yesterday,” he goes on, “it came to my attention that you are swiftly approaching the province of adulthood, that soon the boy will be the man.”

For a minute I was scared he seen me on his wife’s bosom and misinterpreted that event.

“Mrs. Pendrake,” he began, and I gathered my legs under me in case I had to run for it, “Mrs. Pendrake, being a woman, is altogether innocent of these matters. She was not a party to a lie. Looking at you through the eyes of a mother, she saw no blemish in the boy she knows, and that is a credit to her.

“But I am a man, and as such, no stranger to impurity. I myself passed through the years in which you find yourself. I know the Devil, boy, I have shaken him by the hand, I have embraced him and smelled his stinking breath and thought it the finest perfume.”

He got himself exercised with these remarks and pressed his head against the buckboard floor, squashing his black hat, while the wagon lifted several inches out of the mud.

Then he eased and spoke gentle. “I heard that colloquy through my study door. I am aware that you had the knife, boy, and I can imagine only too well your motive for using it against another.… The girl’s identity is of no interest to me. I am willing to believe that although you were doing the Devil’s work you did not recognize him in his female attire. Does she have velvet cheeks, boy, and satin hair and long-lashed eyes undershot with damask? No matter, behind that mask is a skull of white bone with hollow sockets, and that soft pink mouth is the cave of death.”

I just flicked my line as if I had a bite, for whatever could I say to that? As to the girls I had been thrown with so far, they was ten years old in that school class.

“I don’t condemn you, boy,” Pendrake said. “I tell you I know the fire that rises in the loins and sweeps upward consuming all before it. I know the primitive peoples among whom you spent your boyhood make a sacred thing of this conflagration. But that is our difference, is it not? that we harness our bestial energies. That we do not defile but preserve. Woman is a vessel, and it is within man’s power to make that vessel a golden chalice or a slop bucket.”

Along about here, Lavender come down to the bank under his umbrella and toting an enormous basket covered with oilcloth. He scrooched down and peeked at us under the wagon.

When talking to the Reverend he assumed a lazy, whiny, idiotic style that I happened to know he reserved for just that purpose, for he was otherwise very sharp though illiterate as I said.

“Your Honor,” says he, “would … you all … be wantin’ … thisheer lunch?”

“Put it down, that’s a good fellow,” answers Pendrake in a clipped way that he probably figured would stimulate Lavender to move faster but seemed to have the reverse effect.

When Lavender finally trudged away, Pendrake said: “There is a case in point. Can you understand that Lavender and Lucy would have lived in common, defying the ordinances of God and man, had I not insisted on marrying them?”

I might say at this point and then we won’t mention it again, that I do not know whether Pendrake was Abolitionist or Proslavery. He had freed Lavender, if that meant anything. And if he was Abolitionist, why his reason would have been that freedom would make the colored people less lusty. Now I know you can read in history books that the slavery issue was hot in Missouri of this date, and there was private wars over it and shootings in the dead of night, a reign of terror and so on. Well that ain’t no lie, but you could be living right in the middle of it like me and never know it was going on. Remember that next time you read something. I knowed many a man who went all the way across the prairies during the Indian wars and never saw one hostile savage. That’s the way reality operates. I wasn’t ever interested in politics, so I never saw any. In them days there was always somebody getting shot or knifed, and you wouldn’t think nothing of it. And then I have an idea that Pendrake was so respectable that he might not have had to take a loudmouthed stand either way.

The Reverend broke off at that point and pulled the oilcloth from the basket. Lucy had packed us more food than all of Old Lodge Skins’s band ate during one whole winter. There was two or three cold fried chickens, a great hunk of ham, about a dozen hardboiled eggs, two loaves of bread, and a chocolate cake, just to mention the larger items.

We hadn’t done nothing so far but sit under the wagon, and I wasn’t too hungry. I was also feeling a little queasy from being damp in wool; among the Cheyenne you wear leather, which takes the rain almost like your own skin. Or maybe I might have been embarrassed at Pendrake’s jawing about matters that should be private. I guess I already knowed it at ten, before I went with the Indians, but I had forgot how the conjunction of men and women is looked upon as dirty by the whites, so they got to involve it with law. Lucy and Lavender shared the same room, but it was against the laws of God and man until Pendrake said a few words over them, after which it was O.K.

Well, it was an entertainment to see the Reverend consume that lunch. I ate a wing, an egg, and a piece each of bread and cake and felt myself uncomfortable full at that. All the rest went soon enough into Pendrake’s great belly. What was left of the contents of the basket was a pile of cleaned bones and eggshells within fifteen minutes.

Then he brushed his beard with his fingers, though I never in my acquaintance with him saw him drop a crumb into that underbrush-he was neat about food, I believed, because he wasn’t going to let a morsel escape his mouth-and picked his teeth and cleared his passages with a huge draught from a jug of water that Lucy had included.

“It has been a great satisfaction to me to have this talk with you, boy,” he says then. “And I hope and trust you will derive some value from it. We have not before had the opportunity to know each other, for while I am your father upon earth, I am much occupied with serving my own Father in heaven. But He is also yours, and in serving him I am serving you, if I do it properly. That effort leaves me little time for the delightful sport we are enjoying today, though to enjoy oneself moderately is surely no sin.”

I haven’t mentioned how I had to sit Sundays in church and listen to Pendrake’s gab. The only consolation was that Mrs. P. had to go as well, wearing her fine clothes, and it was a proud thing to sit alongside the most beautiful woman in town, with the men, including the ancient elders, stealing looks at her and their women all peevish. But them sermons! Pendrake’s trouble was he didn’t have no fire. Unlike my old man, he didn’t get no release from his religion, but rather was further bottled up by it. That might have kept him from getting killed by savages, but maybe it is worse never to open your spirit up to the wind.

Anyway, he always said a good deal about “sin,” and what I got to wondering now we was sitting there, was what in his opinion constituted such. You may remember with my Pa it was cussing, chewing, spitting, and not washing your face. It seemed likely Pendrake had another view. Anyway, we obviously wasn’t going to catch any fish, and lunch was over, and despite the Reverend’s remarks on the satisfaction afforded by our little talk, he was still uneasy-looking. I reckon a man who puts out words all the time gets to wondering whether they are ever being received.

So to oblige him, with the same motive I had called Mrs. P. “Mother,” I asked about sin. He wasn’t a bad fellow, and he had wiped off my face. I am like an Indian in that if I am treated nice I’ll try to make a return.

He had a wider-sweeping definition of sin than my Pa’s, and a longer list of specifics than my old man had give, probably because Pa was an amateur at preaching and couldn’t read. For Pendrake’s roster wasn’t properly his own but rather, as he admitted, that of the Biblical Paul.

“The works of the flesh,” answers the Reverend. “And ‘the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and such like.’ ”

It was a funny thing, the most important years of my rearing so far had been handled by my second father, who was Old Lodge Skins. Now you take away “envyings” from that list-for he didn’t covet much, owing to his belief he had everything of importance already-and you had a perfect description of that Indian’s character. Yet he was as big a success among the Cheyenne as a man could be.

As to myself, I had performed only a few of them crimes; on the other hand, I was still young.

For the rest of the day, though, I stayed fairly pure and even extended the period for several weeks on. That’s what white life did to me. First time I got soaked in civilization, I come down with pneumonia.