Palisadian. [volume] (Cliffside Park, N.J.) 1906-current, 1908-06-01

pity we'll" was what lads would
grunt to me every day when he came
shyly into the office, and | greeted him
with a friendly, "How-de-doW Then he
would shrug his shoulders in a way that
wrinkled the three KS into such bewilder-
ing folds that you could not have read
them unless you had known what they
were beforehand
One day while he was meannering
about the place, granting quietly to him
self, he upset one of my battery jars.
"Tads,' ! cried, angrily, for the deserts
breath was hot upon me, and was irrita-
ting enough, let alone spilled vitriol
you're little beast! Skip out of here
or II take stick to you!
Then rose great howl from Tads
and he kept on bowling until an Apache
woman came over the sands from the
shacks and gathered him up in her arms.
She was his mother. She eyed me sus-
piciously and walked away with her
highly demonstrativef burden
OF course l regretted my hot language
and wanted the little beggar back again.
1t was so lonely there on the desert.
The wires walled so heart brokenly, while
the sun beat down so fercely in the day
time and the coyotes yelled so dolefully
dI
crept into my heart to be sure
1t was several days before we were
on satisfactory terms again. Tads
wanted to be white man. He wanted
to make talk marks" on "pupper'' with
a feather-I sometimes used quill pen,
be it remarked-and he wanted to speak
with his finger WE'LL l did manage to
teach him a few letters from a railroad
poster, and he learned to drawl out,
'T-a-d-s" in a droll fashion. With a
perseverance that was really startling,
| afterward took him in an uncertain
way through a page or two of Can you
see the fat OK" and so on. Wherefore
his heart was glad.
Me be-white man, heap sure" he de-
clared in his bullfrog voice, after he had
accomplished this wonderful feat.
But becoming a white man, somehow,
is a slow process, and the small start
Tads had made in the evolution was
not encouraging. Sometimes he would
lay his dark hand beside mine and say
that he thought it was getting most as
white" To tell the truth, it was, for the
more l handled freight boxes on the plat
form and swung my clubs under the pep
per-tree. the browner and lonier | be-
came. But lads took no account of that.
He was watching his own progress too
closely to take observation of others
And so it went on for months. | know
not if month means as much to an
Apache boy as it does to a white one
but as a six-year-old the child of civil
zation makes whole decades of it, and a
day is as big and as portentious as a
year. l know mine once were, and l
do not merely take those of other chill
dren for granted.
l did not learn for some time after the
day / first met lads and until after /
had visited the shacks several times that
the place where the Apaches were taking
life so easily did not belong to them by
right, but had been usurped as the
Apaches have a way of doing, being the
fercest marauders of the desert They
had driven a band of peaceful Indians,
to whom the shacks belonged, away from
their homes and were to make a winter
residence there as there medicine man
had predicted heap big snow"
When spring came round, the chief of
the band sighed for the hills and he urged
his medicine man to have a revelation