couldn't get away with that rotten meat I saw you lugging
around. We'll see."

So he mixed a pint of medicine.

"There's Epsom salts for the real part of trouble," observed F.,
still talking to himself, "and here's a few things for the fake."

He then proceeded to concoct a mixture whose recoil was the exact
measure of his imagination. The imagination was only limited by
the necessity of keeping the mixture harmless. Every hot, biting,
nauseous horror in camp went into that pint measure.

"There," concluded F., "if you drink that and come back again
to-morrow for treatment, I'll believe you ARE sick."

Without undue pride I would like to record that I was the first
to think of putting in a peculiarly nauseous gun oil, and thereby
acquired a reputation of making tremendous medicine.

So implicit is this faith in white man's medicine that at one of
the Government posts we were approached by one of the secondary
chiefs of the district. He was a very nifty savage, dressed for
calling, with his hair done in ropes like a French poodle's, his
skin carefully oiled and reddened, his armlets and necklets
polished, and with the ceremonial ball of black feathers on the
end of his long spear. His gait was the peculiar mincing teeter
of savage conventional society. According to custom, he
approached unsmiling, spat carefully in his palm, and shook
hands. Then he squatted and waited.