"It happens more or less frequently," said a traveling Inspector of Indian Agencies, "that an educated buck Indian degenerates in the long run into a bad proposition. I'm thinking particularly of an educated Oregon Indian, about a three-quarter blood, who got the big-head so bad after he had been polished off mentally back this way that he never mixed up with his people when he returned from the East. He was a Umatilla. He was first sent to Carlisle, and when he had finished there he was passed on to Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore, to take the law course there. It was in view that he was to become the attorney for his tribe upon the conclusion of his Blackstone-thumbing. He squeezed through the law at Johns Hopkins, and then he was told of the nice fat thing that awaited him out among his own people. He turned the proposition down cold. He said flatly that he had no intention whatever of mixing up with his own bunch at all any more. He likewise remarked that he knew his gait, and that he intended to follow it.

"A couple of months after he quit Baltimore he turned up at The Dalles in Western Oregon and settled down to the career of a short poker player. Where he had picked up the game it would be hard to say; but he certainly was a daisy at it. There wasn't a kink in the game that he didn't have the hang of. Now, The Dalles isn't any bad man's camp; it is a very beautiful health resort in the Cascade Mountains, on the south bank of the Columbia River; there wasn't a hard character in the place until this educated buck established his headquarters there; and it suited his game to a T. He made it his business to nail young tourists who didn't have any more sense than to sit into a poker game with a stranger, much less an Indian, and an educated Indian at that; and he just stripped them in sets of fours for several years. He was a splendid-looking buck and he dressed as men dress who've got the money to tog themselves out right back this way. When he was engaged in the act of getting a new victim he knew how to throw much cordiality and some grace into his manners; but ordinarily he was a sulky, morose, bad Indian. 'Way down in the deeps of him he was a rank coward, for he never tried to twist his tentacles about a man who he thought would make a stand, much less a scrap, upon discovering that he was being done; he always picked out palpable lily-livers who looked, to his shrewd eye, as if they would stand for anything rather than mix it up with him.

"It did not take the square people of The Dalles long to get next to the fact that this educated Indian, who had coolly taken up his abode among them, was a cheat and a swindler, and that his sole occupation consisted in fleecing pulp-headed young tourists. They talked a great deal of giving him the razzle-dazzle and chasing him out, but somehow or other this suggestion never came to a head. The men at The Dalles who had the interest of the place at heart would point the swellerino buck out to young strangers who looked as if they might be likely victims of the Indian short-card fleecer, and tell the young goslings just where and how the buck stood. It may sound incredible, but even after being warned in this fashion a whole lot of the young addlepates fell into the buck's mesh and got themselves done to a proper turn by him. They were able to take care of themselves, they would reply chestily to their warners, and, just to prove it, they'd take a hack at the Indian's game. When they got through they'd be smoking punk tobacco in pipes while the Indian would be blowing the smoke of perfectos in their faces, and they'd stand for their craggy end of it without a whistle. The buck was 6 feet 3 inches high and weighed 235 pounds, and he looked like a macerator from the high ridges. So he was never called by any of his Dalles victims, even when they knew the details of how they'd been plucked. One poor little devil of a rich man's son from Omaha whimpered one night when the Indian had removed about $800 from him by dealing from both ends and the middle of the deck, and he said to the buck piteously:

"'I just hope you've played fair, that's all.'

"The Indian reached over and struck the pollywog with all of his force on both sides of the face with his two open palms, leaving the blood-red welt marks of his fingers on the lamb's fair cheeks. The whining victim drilled for his life up the hotel stairs to his room, and the Indian looked after him sardonically. There wasn't a man about that didn't know that the Indian had scandalously cheated the lad, but not a one of them said a word. There was a keen-eyed, big-framed, prematurely gray-haired man, a stranger, standing at the hotel desk reading a just-arrived letter, when the thing happened. His face flushed angrily when he saw the burly Indian slap the undersized fool of a boy, and he turned to the hotel clerk and remarked:

"'Is this the real thing here? Does the gang stand for that kind of work on the part of a mud-hided raw-meater?' There was plenty of contempt in the way the stranger spoke.

"The clerk shrugged his shoulders. 'We can't undertake to cut in on any of the plays of our guests,' he replied. 'We just board and lodge 'em, that's all. If they're jays enough to mix up with grafters, it's their game, and we're not asking for any rake-off, one way or the other.'

"The stranger muttered something about a chicken-livered population, and strolled out. He took his train an hour or so later.

"At certain seasons of the year, when there wasn't must doing in his line at The Dalles, owing to periodical scarcities of pluckable tourists, the Indian would hit up Baker City, Pendleton, and other Oregon towns in search of good things, and a couple of times a year he included Olympia and Walla Walla in his itinerary. He sung somewhat smaller in those places than he did at The Dalles, but by keeping his eye skinned for men liable to call the turn on him and working quietly he generally succeeded in pulling apart at least one jelly-fish in each of the towns he took in on these off-season tours.

"About three months after he had left the marks of his fingers on the lamb's face at The Dalles—this was in the fall of '92—he turned up one day at Walla Walla. He strolled around the hotel corridors with an eye to business, and along toward night he met with a young fellow named Hellen, whose father, a wealthy Chicago man, had recently foreclosed a mortgage on a big ranch about sixty miles from Walla Walla. The son, a rather raw young chap, had come out to look the ranch over, and the Indian got next to him as soon as he struck the town. The buck was an expert billiard player, and he suggested a game of pin billiards to the young Hellen chap. He played off on the youth, and soon got him to betting on shots. After losing about a dozen $5 bets on shots, the Indian socked it to the young man from Chicago by betting $300 that he could execute a certain difficult shot. It looked like board and lodging to the young man that the Indian's $300 would spin into his clothes, so he put up $300. The Indian made the shot with consummate ease and took down the pot.

"'Fluke!' said young Hellen. 'I'll go you another $300.'

"The buck got this bunch, too, without half trying. It would naturally be thought that the tenderfoot would have smelt a rat by this time. But he didn't. He had plenty of money, and probably he considered it piquant to lose his coin to a swagger-looking, educated Indian. Anyhow, the two were playing poker in the card-room of Walla Walla's stag hotel half an hour later.

"There were plenty of men in that card-room who knew that the Indian was a short-carder, but men out that way aren't garrulous, and they pay a heap of attention to the job of minding their own business. The youth from Chicago was the merest mutt in the hands of the Indian, and he lost from the jump. He would stand pat on a full house, and the buck, drawing three cards, would still beat him after sky-scraping betting. A number of onlookers at the game may have seen the little side-plays of the Indian, but they only grinned at each other over the hopeless imbecility of the young man from Chicago.

"Finally the Indian, perhaps losing some of his dexterity from the drinks he was steadily absorbing, over-stepped himself. He filled two pairs from the discard and he did it clumsily. The young man with whom he was playing saw the move.

"'I say, there,' said he, 'what are you doing there, you know?' pointing to the discard. 'Didn't you—er—didn't you make a mistake and take a card out of that pile?'

"The Indian, who was about $1,600 to the good, had cold feet, anyhow, and so he threw his hand face downward on the table and glared at the Chicago boy. The Chicago boy quailed.

"'Er—well, maybe I made the mistake myself'—he started to say, when a big voice cut in with:

"'No, you didn't son. You didn't make any mistake at all. You're up against the real thing in the way of a mud-skinned short-riffler, that's all.'

"A keen-eyed, big-framed, prematurely gray-haired man was the speaker. As he spoke he reached down from behind the Indian's chair and got two huge hands around the buck's neck. The onlookers formed a clearing. The Chicago youth got himself on the outskirts of the bunch.

"'About three months ago,' said the keen-eyed man, dragging the huge, half-choked Indian to his feet, 'I saw you at The Dalles leave the prints of your dirty fingers on the face of a little whiffet you had just fleeced. I hankered then to confer a few personally conducted slaps of my own make and manufacture on your coppery jowls, but for some reason or other I passed the hanker up on that occasion. Well, the slaps are coming to you now. It's better late than never, and I'm going to slap you into jerked beef just for luck.'

"The buck was finally up against the real thing, and he knew it. I'll bet that his face was whiter than mine is now when the big-framed man, who had the devil of anger lurking in his eyes, suddenly loosed his right hand from around the Indian's neck, and, still clutching him by the left, swept the loose arm back for the momentum and brought his heavy palm smack against the buck's left cheek with a noise that sounded like the explosion of a charge of blasting powder. The slap rattled the Indian's teeth and made his big head joggle from side to side like the head of an automaton. Clutching the Indian's throat again then with his right hand, the big-framed man repeated the slapping performance on the Indian's right cheek with his left hand, and left a welt there that might have been made by a cat-o'-nine tails. The buck was too dazed, in the first place, by the suddenness of it all, to make a move: in the second place, he was too cowardly. The big-framed man—he was an expert mining engineer from Nevada, and his name was Varus Pryor—slapped the Indian's face, first with his right and then with his left, for three minutes, with all his might, and then, getting behind the buck, proceeded to slap him into the street. With first one hand and then the other clutching the collar of the Indian's coat, he slapped him out to the front door of the hotel. Then he gave the buck the knee in the small of the back, and hoisted him across the pavement to the middle of the street, where the Indian spun around and fell for a moment.

"'I don't care what the Indian Bureau says about it,' said the keen-eyed man, standing in the doorway of the hotel. 'God Almighty never intended that white men should stand for such alligators as that copper-mugged swindler, and'——

"'Stand clear, pard, he's going to plug you!' shouted a man from a second-story window of the hotel.

"The Indian, pretending to be hurt, and only half risen to his feet in the obscurity of the middle of the street, had got his gun out, and the yell from the second story reached Pryor just in time. As it was, the buck planted a ball in the front door of the hotel, only two inches above the big-framed man's head. By that time Pryor's gun was working, and he drilled six holes forty-eight hundredths of an inch in diameter plumb through the swindling Umatilla's chest. Forty-five minutes later he was acquitted by a coroner's jury on the grounds of self-defense and justifiable homicide—a two-in-one verdict.

"This," concluded the traveling Inspector of Indian Agencies, "was the finish of just one mentally-burnished buck Indian, and I know of several others."