CHAPTER XXXI
"You can never trust an Indian," said Mrs Murchison at
the anxious family council. "Well do I remember them when
you were a little thing, Advena, hanging round the town
on a market-day; and the squaws coming to the back door
with their tin pails of raspberries to sell, and just
knowing English enough to ask a big price for them. But
it was on the squaws we depended in those days, or go
without raspberry preserves for the winter. Slovenly-looking
things they were with their three or four coloured
petticoats and their papooses on their backs. And for
dirt--! But I thought they were all gone long ago."
"There are enough of them left to make trouble all right,"
said Alec. "They don't dress up like they used to, and
I guess they send the papooses to kindergarten now; but
you'll find plenty of them lying around any time there's
nothing to do but vote and get drunk."
Allowing for the natural exaggeration of partisanship,
the facts about the remaining red man of Moneida were
much as Alec described them. On market-days he slid
easily, unless you looked twice, into what the Express
continues to call the farming community. Invariably, if
you did look twice, you would note that his stiff felt
hat was an inch taller in the crown than those worn
generally by the farming community, the pathetic assertion,
perhaps, of an old sovereignty; invariably, too his coat
and trousers betrayed a form within, which, in the effort
at adaptation, had become high-shouldered and lank of
leg.
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