Early in the week five Crow chiefs passed through here on their way to Washington.

I went down to see them. They were as fine looking children of the forest as I ever saw. They wore buckskin pants with overskirt of same. The hair was worn Princesse, held in place with Frazer's axle grease and large mother of clamshell brooch. Down the back it was braided like a horse's tail on a muddy day, only the hair was coarser.

When an Indian wants to crimp his hair he has to run it through a rolling mill first, to make it malleable. Then the blacksmith of the tribe rolls it up over the ordinary freight car coupling pin, and on the following morning it hangs in graceful Saratoga waves down the back of the untutored savage.

I said to the interpreter who seemed to act as their trainer, "No doubt these Crows are going to Washington to try and interest Hayes in their Caws."

He gave a low, gurgling laugh.

"No," said he with a merry twinkle of the eye, as he laid his lip half way across a plug of government tobacco, "as spring approaches they have decided to go to Washington and ransack the Indian Bureau for their gauzy Schurz."

I caught hold of a car seat and rippled till the coach was filled with my merry, girlish laughter.

These Indians wear high expressive cheek-bones, and most of them have strabismus in their feet. They had their paint on. It makes them look like a chromo of Powhattan mashing the eternal soul out of John Smith with a Bologna sausage.

One of these chiefs, named Raw-Dog-with-a-Bunion-on the-Heel, I think, chief of the Wall-eyed Skunk Eaters, looked so guileless and kind that I approached him and said that no doubt the war-path in the land of the setting sun was overgrown with grass, and in his mountain home very likely the beams of peace! lit up the faces of his tribe.

He did not seem to catch my meaning.

I asked him if his delegation was going to Washington uninstructed.

In reply he made a short remark something like that which the shortstop of a match game makes when a hot ball takes him unexpectedly between the gastric and the liver pad.

Somehow live Indians do not look so picturesque as the steel engraving does. The smell is not the same, either. Steel engravings of Indians do not show the decalcomania outline of a frying-pan on the buckskin pants where the noble red man made a misstep one morning and sat down on his breakfast.

A dead Indian is a pleasing picture. The look of pain and anxiety is gone, and rest, sweet rest—more than he really needs—has come at last. His hands are folded peacefully and his mouth is open, like the end of a sawmill. His trials are o'er. His swift foot is making pigeon-toed tracks in the shifting sands of eternity.

The picture of a wild free Indian chasing the buffalo may suit some, but I like still life in art. I like the picture of a broad-shouldered, well-formed brave as he lies with his nerveless hand across a large hole in the pit of his stomach.

There is something so sweetly sad about it. There is such a nameless feeling of repose and security on the part of the spectator.

Some have such sensitive natures that they cannot look at the remains of an Indian who has been run over by two sections of freight, but I can. Somehow I do not feel that nervous distrust when I look at the red man with his osophagus wrapped around his head and tied in a double bow knot, that I do when he is full of the vigor of health.

When a train of cars has jammed his thigh-bone through his diaphragm and flattened his head out like a soup plate, I feel then that I can trust him. I feel that he may be relied upon. I consider him in the character of ghastly remains as a success. He seems at last so in earnest and as though he could be trusted.

When the Indian has been mixed up so that the closest scrutiny cannot determine where the head adjourns and the thorax begins, the scene is so suggestive of unruffled quiet and calm and gentle childlike faith that doubt and distrust and timidity and apprehension flee away.