he was one of the whitest men I ever knew. As a Cherokee, he was a
gentleman on the first ballot. As a ward of the nation, he was mighty
hard to carry at the primaries.

"John Tom and me got together and began to make medicine--how to get up
some lawful, genteel swindle which we might work in a quiet way so as
not to excite the stupidity of the police or the cupidity of the larger
corporations. We had close upon $500 between us, and we pined to make it
grow, as all respectable capitalists do.

"So we figured out a proposition which seems to be as honorable as a
gold mine prospectus and as profitable as a church raffle. And inside
of thirty days you find us swarming into Kansas with a pair of fluent
horses and a red camping wagon on the European plan. John Tom is Chief
Wish-Heap-Dough, the famous Indian medicine man and Samaritan Sachem
of the Seven Tribes. Mr. Peters is business manager and half owner. We
needed a third man, so we looked around and found J. Conyngham Binkly
leaning against the want column of a newspaper. This Binkly has a
disease for Shakespearian rôles, and an hallucination about a 200
nights' run on the New York stage. But he confesses that he never could
earn the butter to spread on his William S. rôles, so he is willing to
drop to the ordinary baker's kind, and be satisfied with a 200-mile
run behind the medicine ponies. Besides Richard III, he could do
twenty-seven coon songs and banjo specialties, and was willing to cook,
and curry the horses. We carried a fine line of excuses for taking
money. One was a magic soap for removing grease spots and quarters from
clothes. One was a Sum-wah-tah, the great Indian Remedy made from a
prairie herb revealed by the Great Spirit in a dream to his favorite
medicine men, the great chiefs McGarrity and Siberstein, bottlers,
Chicago. And the other was a frivolous system of pick-pocketing the