Page:Sunset Magazine vol. 31.pdf/949

972 "No, I won't" I says. "Let 'em alone. They're goin' after their money. They'll be comin' back theirselves. You watch."

And here they come. You don't need to ask me where they get it, because I ain't able to tell you; but you get an Indian camp to wantin' a thing and they can always produce the price. All they do is just to crawl back in their tepees and feel around under their blankets, or scratch a little hole in the sand, and up it comes. These boys had it. The old one come first, with his three dollars gripped in his big fat hand, and he took his bottle and tipped the neck of it up to his mouth for a real drink. It was quarter empty when he took it away, and he was certainly one happy man. I'd never saw but one other one near as happy as him. That one was a Shoshone, up in the Wind river country, that had bought a whole case of pain-killer off of the agent, and he'd emptied all the bottles in a tin bucket and was drink in it out of the bucket. But our Sioux was the happiest. There just couldn't be any mistake about it: that truck just exactly suited him.

Listen: you don't have to believe it, but by the end of the afternoon there wasn't a thing left in the tub but a little mess of settlin's, and some of the first ones was beginnin' to come back for a second helpin'. I'd lost count of the bottles we'd sold, and of the money too. The Professor had the money in a gripsack he'd brought the bundles in from the drugstore, and it was so heavy he had to keep changin' it from one side to the other, packin' it over to the hotel. It sort of satisfied me, noticin' the heft of it. I expected the Professor to be satisfied, too; wouldn't you? He wasn't. He was grumblin' all the way over to town.

"Why didn't we mix up more of it?" he says, "We might just as well have put in another hour before supper, while the luck was runnin' good. It's risky to fool with luck like that. We'll have to get a barrel, instead of the tub."

"But, gee whiz!" I says. "I wish you'd tell me how much of it a man can take into his system without its makin' cinders and ashes of him. One dose nigh ruined me; but them lads are absorbin' it by the pint."

He grinned sideways at me. "I don't know" he says, "If they're in good health they ought to be able to stand it till their money peters out. That ain't what's worryin' me. What I want to know is, how much money have they got?"

"There's no use worryin' any about that" I says, "because we're liable to get all they've got, any way. We can count it afterwards."

The girl, she'd been stayin' at the hotel in the afternoon, while we was tryin' the thing. She went back with us after supper, in her buckskin clothes and with her little target gun, and commenced to pop it at a mark while we was fillin' our barrel with water; but the Sioux wasn't takin' a mite of interest in her. They was keepin' their eyes on me and the Professor; and then pretty soon the Professor made her quit and come and help us fill up the bottles. It was as much as the three of us could do. Nor we wasn't stickin' to half-pints any more. We'd brought over some empty quarts; and, besides, they come at us with tin cans, and little buckets, and old coffee pots, to get 'em filled up; and one lean old squaw brought down a battered old kerosene can. For as much as three hours I didn't have time to do a blessed thing but make motions with my hands. It wasn't till I'd gone to bed, along in the middle of the night, that I got time to make a few motions with my mind.

"Billy" I says to myself, "what was that about a rainbow? Why, what we’ve got here is a whole flock of 'em!"

It was just the same next day; and then the third day a new bunch moved down from the reservation, and some more the day after. My word, it begun to get hum-drum, doin' nothin' all day long but dip the truck out of the barrel and reach after the money. There was a whole week of it, and I was commencin' to wish the thing would change, somehow. A streak of luck like that was makin' me nervous and uneasy. It couldn’t last, could it? I wanted to know what was comin' afterwards.

Well, I found out. There come a couple days, at the last end, when business slacked off considerable, and the next day we didn't sell nothin' but little dabs and driblets; and the day after that all the Sioux done was to come down and stand around us or squat on the sand, real dejected. We hadn't sold but a couple bottles by the middle of the mornin'; and then one of the young bucks come at