Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 4 (1925-10).djvu/80

by Alanson Skinner

Michael Angelo stood behind the agency building shining shoes for the agent's wife. Whatever resentment he might have felt at being assigned so menial a task, and one certainly not within the scope of his duties as agency clerk, he concealed behind a mask of stolid indifference. His parents had not given him the name of Michael Angelo. To them, and to his people, the Folles Avoines, he was He-comes-rumbling, a man of the Thunder clan. But, to ears accustomed to the English language alone, the native name seemed hard, and so the good missionaries at the Friends' School, having run out of William Penns, George Washingtons, and Abraham Lincolns for that school generation, had renamed him Michael Angelo, and the name had stuck to him through their school, followed him through Carlisle, and was now his official cognomen on the Indian reservation. One of his brothers, with utter disregard to family ties, even as the white man knows them, was named, at the same time, Henry Clay, and another Robert E. Lee. However, Mike did not care; most of his people labored under two titles, one for government purposes, and one for home consumption, and they found it handy, rather than otherwise.

A shadow fell across the bench where Michael Angelo sat, and he looked up to see an elderly Indian, partly clad in the native garb of his tribe; leggings of deerskin, moccasins, a calico shirt, and a Stetson hat that crowned his shock of dark hair, bobbed at his shoulders. The older man sat down on the end of the bench, and produced a pipe with a carved redstone bowl and a short wooden stem. From a beaded buckskin pouch he extracted some tobacco, mixed with kinnikinic, loaded his pipe, with great deliberateness, tamped down the tobacco with a little carved stick, lighted it, and smoked a while in silence. Then he began to speak in their ancient tongue. In a rich, clear, bell-like voice he spoke, and a white bystander, hearing the sonorous cadence of his words, the gentle rise and fall of their pitch, after the custom of the Folles Avoines, would have imagined that the old man was addressing words of encouragement or sympathy to the other, but he would have been grossly mistaken. The voice of the elder was, indeed, warm and sympathetic, but the words were bitter and sarcastic.