Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/142

 his curiosity, the faintest odor awakened his suspicions. He noted the smallest depression in the sand, the least deflection in the twigs or branches; no stone could be moved from its position in the trail without appealing at once to his perceptions. He became skilled in the language of "signs" and trails, and so perfectly conversant with all that is concealed in the great book of Nature that, in the mountains at least, he might readily take rank as being fully as much an Indian as the Indian himself.

There never was an officer in our military service so completely in accord with all the ideas, views, and opinions of the savages whom he had to fight or control as was General Crook. In time of campaign this knowledge placed him, as it were, in the secret councils of the enemy; in time of peace it enabled him all the more completely to appreciate the doubts and misgivings of the Indians at the outset of a new life, and to devise plans by which they could all the more readily be brought to see that civilization was something which all could embrace without danger of extinction.

But while General Crook was admitted, even by the Indians, to be more of an Indian than the Indian himself, it must in no wise be understood that he ever occupied any other relation than that of the older and more experienced brother who was always ready to hold out a helping hand to the younger just learning to walk and to climb. Crook never ceased to be a gentleman. Much as he might live among savages, he never lost the right to claim for himself the best that civilization and enlightenment had to bestow. He kept up with the current of thought on the more important questions of the day, although never a student in the stricter meaning of the term. His manners were always extremely courteous, and without a trace of the austerity with which small minds seek to hedge themselves in from the approach of inferiors or strangers. His voice was always low, his conversation easy, and his general bearing one of quiet dignity.

He reminded me more of Daniel Boone than any other character, with this difference, that Crook, as might be expected, had the advantages of the better education of his day and generation. But he certainly recalled Boone in many particulars; there was the same perfect indifference to peril of any kind, the same coolness, an equal fertility of resources, the same inner knowl