Sew. 24, 1904.3 
FOREST _ AND STREAM 
288 
imposed sentence of perpetual exile. He musn't worry 
about' her, for she was all right, only awfully lonely, and 
must continue so, since Fate had ordained that, she must 
live and die an old maid. And she gave her new and 
permanent address at the head of the sheet. Oh, it was a 
peach of a letter, and what did Dave do but sit right down 
and write her father that he was into a safe deal that 
would clear him a neat fortune, providing he could get a 
temporary loan of $5,000 to help carry it through. The 
money came by return mail, Dave hastened to his charmer 
and had the door slammed in his whiskey-bloated face; 
and that night he was pulled out of the gutter dead drunk, 
and every cent of his fraudulently obtained money gone. 
What did he do ? Why, as a last proof of his love, he 
h6boed his way as- far as possible from the lady before 
penning a brief confession of fraud and surrendering to 
the law. 
"Another case in point was that of Montgomery Gray, 
who attempted to make something of himself somewhere 
else and failed because of his natural limitations. He 
struck the mill bubbling with the theory that civilization 
was a failure, and a primitive life the only one worth liv- 
ing, bought the first forty acres of land offered him, 
pitched together some rough boards for a home, and mar- 
ried Bob Pilkington's plump and comely daughter. All 
this was in accordance with his plan of campaign, but the 
girl was a fool to have him, for all of his city garb and 
manner and education. He was physically incapable of 
hard work, and lacked enterprise and gumption to profit 
by the labor of others. Malaria got him down and staid 
with him all the first summer. The little money he had 
brought with him vanished dollar by dollar, and the com- 
ing of winter found the young couple at the verge of 
starvation. I found some easy work for Gray to do, and 
none too soon, for he was shoeless and his clothing was 
in rags and tatters. In my stock of dry goods was a pair 
of cheap cotton pants that he fancied and also a nobby lit- 
tle derby hat which appealed directly to his taste. I had 
thought of giving them to him, but believed it best not to 
lead him into the habit of accepting charity. 'Don't 
sell them to anyone else,' said he on starting home Fri- 
day evening. 'To-morrow I'll have $6 coming and possi- 
bly I can spare the $2.25 for their purchase.' Next morn- 
ing Mrs. Gray told him what groceries were needed, foot- 
ing up a total of $3.50. He was whistling as he started 
out at the gate — actually whistling ! for the first time in 
months. 'Monty,' she called. 'Yes, dearest,' 'You'll have 
ter fotch me a pair of shoes. Bradley has some toler'ble 
good ones fer a dollar.' 'All right, Sally.' The derby had 
sailed out of his reach. 'An' 'bout ten yards of calico— 
somethin' in leetle figgers.' Good-by, pants ! Gray halted 
and clutched both hands in his hair; then suddenly re- 
assumed his cheerfulness. There was still a quarter he 
could call his own. Twenty yards further, and again that 
commanding voice : 'A bottle of snuff, Monty— don't fer- 
git it.' Poor devil ! He sank on his knees in six inches of 
soft mud, cut savagely at his throat with a dull pocket 
knife, and his troubles came to an end then and there. 
T wouldn't have thought it of Monty,' was his wife's ver- 
dict. 'Killed hisself jes' 'cause I axed him ter buy me 
some snuff — an' me as good ter him as ever a woman 
could be!'" S. D. Barnes. 
The Sign Language. 
Editor Forest and Stream: \ 
In his account of the younger Henry in the number for 
September 10, Mr. Grinnell makes a statement that rather 
surprised me. It was that Henry, on his visit to the Man- 
dans, first saw the sign language used there by the 
Pawnees who had come there to make a treaty of peace. 
T had supposed that long before this Henry would not 
only have seen the sign language, but might have learned 
to use it himself. It would have come useful to him very 
often in his business. 
This sign language is known to every tribe from the 
Lake of the Woods to the Rio Grande. I first saw it 
used when a boy by the Teton Sioux, and since then have 
seen it almost times without number. Since first seeing it, 
I have often thought that whoever invented the deaf mute 
alphabet might have got his first idea of it from the In- 
dian sign language. Tunderstand, of course, that the deaf 
mute uses signs to represent the letters that spell his 
words, while the Indian, having no alphabet, uses signs 
for the words themselves. 
When a boy I drove a team from St. Paul clear across 
Minnesota and hundreds of miles south and west of it. 
The wagon belonged to a party of young men from the 
East who were hunting ; they and I put in nearly a year 
there. While we were still in Minnesota we picked lip a 
small band of Dakotas, who kept us company that winter 
and the following spring, until a cavalry expedition from 
Fort Laramie met us and turned the Indians back home. 
The men in this party would often use the sign language 
at my request; and a boy of my own age who was with 
them could use it. This boy was my hunting companion, 
and I might have learned it from him. He did teach me 
to kill buffalo, while I taught him English. I did pick up 
a few of his signs, as the one for a camp, "one sleep," a 
horse running, a deer and a buffalo, and the request for a 
drink of water. 
While I was with the Comanches I was one evening in 
the chief Asahabit's lodge (we had just got home after 
an all-winter buffalo hunt), when a Pawnee chief paid us 
a visit. Our chief and he put in about an hour holding 
a conversation in the sign language, and every once in a 
while in the course of the story Asahabit would make 
some reference to me, as I could tell by the Pawnee look- 
ing at me, and once when he looked he laughed. 
After he had left, I asked our chief what all this confab 
had been about, and he told me that each of them had 
told the other all about the previous winter's hunt. The 
laugh had been over a turkey hunt that I had made, when 
my saddle mule deserted me and left me to walk home. 
The chief could have taught me the sign language, if I 
had taken the trouble to learn it; we could talk to each 
other in both his and my language then. 
A white interpreter by the name of Clark, whom I saw 
more or less of for a good many years in that country, 
could use the signs as well as an Indian could, and often 
used them when he might have spoken in the Indian's 
tongue. He spoke several of their languages. At another 
time, Chief Asahabit and I were out a few miles from the 
Wichita agency when we met the Apache chief Eugene. 
His band was at that agency then, and may be there yet. 
Eugene was driving a wagon loaded with rations which 
he had just drawn, and stopping he addressed me in Eng- 
lish. Then he and Asahabit carried on their conversation 
in English. I thought at the time that they did it because 
I was there, but on asking Asahabit about it, he said that 
Eugene did not know the sign language. 
"Why don't the Apaches know it ? I thought all tribes 
did." 
"Yes, many Apaches do, but he don't; he is too stupid 
to learn." 
I knew him better than that, and on paying his camp a 
visit a few days after, I gave him the sign for a drink of 
water. He called a squaw to bring it. "Do you know all 
the sign language?" I asked. 
Yes, certainly he did, and he seemed to be surprised at 
my doubting that he did. I did not tell him, though, 
about Asahabit's estimate of his intelligence; it would 
not have served to make them any better friends, and they 
were none too good friends as it was. 
I have asked old Indians about the origin of the sign 
language. None of them seemed to know how old it was ; 
it is probably nearly as old as the Indian. 
Cabia Blanco. 
The Improved Wilderness. 
My eye, roving over a newspaper page filled with 
correspondence from the summer resorts, was caught by 
the name of an Adirondack lake that I knew years ago — 
no matter how many — before it had been discovered by 
the crowd, and I read how the railroad has brought it 
out of the wilderness and developed it into an "improved" 
resort, with new and modern features, hotels, and all 
the conveniences. 
That word "improved" annoyed me. To my mind the 
forest, the lake and stream are perfect as nature made 
them, and the works of man only mar them. In the years 
gone by, my lake was in the heart of the ancient wood, 
and known and loved by a few. Its waters were vexed 
only by the. paddle, and the laugh of the loon was the 
harshest sound that broke its spell of silence. The forest 
around the lake was unbroken, unscarred bv ax or fire, 
whispering the mysteries of the world as God made it, 
and athrill with the life of the wild. 
It is all "improved" now. The pulp mill vandals dis- 
covered the forest and hewed great gashes through it 
to the lake. The railroad followed through one of the 
gashes. Hotel men built hideous packing cases on the 
shores of the lake and invited' all the world , to come 
and be packed into the boxes and "enj oy nature." Shriek- 
ing locomotives drove the deer affrighted from his morn- 
ing drink, and sent him bounding far into the woods, 
and yelping steamboats and coughing vapor launches 
banished silence from the moonlit lake at night. 
Those were some of the improvements wrought in the 
years when I was far away and did not know that the 
lake had been discovered, and they struck me as a blow 
in the face when I stole away from the clatter of the city 
and thought to find peace and rest in the woods as of 
old. I went in by the old way, a long drive through 
the woods, and found the log cabin that used to shelter 
a few fishermen and hunters grown into a hotel full of 
vacation guests, mostly women. The landlord smiled 
pityingly when I arrived in the night, and told me I 
could have come all the way by rail to the other end of 
the lake and taken the steamer direct to his landing, 
thereby saving some hours and team hire. 
It was no part of my plan to idle about a hotel and 
listen to the chatter of the veranda; and so I inquired of 
the landlord if any of the crowd had found an old camp 
by a certain spring in the woods some miles away. He 
assured me that none of his guests would think of ven- 
turing out of sight of the house without a guide, and as 
there were no longer guides to be hired — all the old- 
timers having steady jobs on the steamboats or in the 
mill down the river— it was not likely that the camp was 
occupied. 
In the morning I stowed blankets, provisions, and an 
ax in a canoe and paddled away no the lake, around the 
point and up a stream that comes into the lake through 
a part of the forest not yet devastated by the pulp mill 
Philistines, and then f took the short trail to the camp. 
The old, open bark shelter was there, but it was occupied 
by a party of lads who had made it air-tight with tar- 
paulin, and installed a stove inside with iron pipe stick- 
ing up through the roof. They were afraid of the night 
air, and had sealed themselves up to avoid catching colds. 
Their camp equipage would have foundered the pack 
train of a cavalry troop, and it had been transported in 
big trunks and packing cases. They had all the modern 
conveniences and comforts of home. 
They were good boys, but they were totally ignorant 
of all the forest laws and of the rights of a stranger in 
camp; for it is the law of the woods that no man may 
monopolize an open camp when a forest traveler arrives 
and seeks shelter. However, I soon had shelter of my 
own making, and as the boys looked as if they were about 
tired of camping out, I prepared to stay by the spring, 
confident that soon I would be alone. 
There was one disturbing feature of the situation. 
Someone had built a closed camp, a small frame house, 
close by. It was locked and the windows were boarded 
up, and perhaps it would remain so for a week or two, 
1 thought. Vain thought. Two days later a man came 
and opened the house and set it in order. I meditated 
flight deeper into the woods ; but the woods might be 
full of campers, and it would be as well to remain and 
see what' sort of an outfit would turn up. 
The next morning a little steamboat came tooting up 
the creek, shoved her nose against the bank and landed 
a party of three men and three women, with a wagon- 
load of baggage, including two barrels of beer, cases of 
liquor, and a stack of guns. The outfit was installed in 
the closed camp, and as soon as the trunks were un- 
packed the newcomers got out the guns and began prac- 
ticing at marks. 
It was still in the close season for game, and the deer 
had been coming down to the creek fearlessly and play- 
ing in the open grassy places. I had sat quietly in the 
canoe and watched a half-grown fawn play for an hour 
within fifty yards, and I had heard the bucks at night 
feeding among the lily-pads in the backwater, and pass- 
ing my bivouac on their way to an old salt-lick in the 
woods. No more of that, I thought, when my new 
neighbors began shelling the woods. They were up 
bright and early the next morning to try their guns again, 
and for an hour or more the forest rang with the roar of 
their artillery. 
Just as well, after all, I reflected, that the wild things 
should be notified early and thoroughly to get out of the 
neighborhood before the opening of the hunting season, 
and my approval of the bombardment became more pro- 
nounced when several would-be deer slayers, each one 
accompanied by a guide, paddled up the stream before 
night to get into the "flow" on one of the adjacent 
ponds, and I saw that all of them were provided with 
jack lights for illegal use in floating for deer. The 
season would open at midnight, which accounted for the 
influx of hunters. 
Not wanting a deer, and carrying no rifle, the bombard- 
ment kept up at~ intervals through the day by my neigh- 
bors of the beer barrels did not worry me, and so I 
chuckled as I thought of the other fellows floating 
around in the chill mists all night looking and listening 
for the game that would not come. It occurred to me, 
too, that the safest place in the Adirondacks that night 
would be elsewhere than on any pond in the immediate 
vicinity, and I wondered if the season would be opened 
with the usual "mistaken for a deer" incident. 
Several of the floaters had tales in the morning of hav- 
ing heard and fired at deer in the dark, and all had ex- 
cellent excuses for missing. The favorite excuse, given 
in confidence, was that the man who paddled wiggled the 
boat at the critical moment. I didn't believe there was 
a deer within a mile of the flow during the night, and I 
reflected upon the inscrutable wisdom of Providence that 
denied to the average "vacationer" the skill to hit any- 
thing he thinks he aims at with a rifle. Surely Provi- 
dence stood watch that night in the Adirondacks. 
During the day I wandered deep into the forest, out of 
hearing of the guns, and sat upon a moss-covered log 
for an hour or two to renew acquaintance with the wood 
folk. If one wishes really to meet and know the wood 
folk, it is well to cultivate the difficult art of sitting on 
a log. 
I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of a 
spotted fawn within an hour. The dainty little thing 
came trotting out of a thicket straight toward me, and 
stopped, wide-eyed and inquisitive, a dozen yards away. 
Rather an odd looking stump she thought, perhaps ; but 
obviously a stump, because it did not move. A step 
nearer, and still no movement. Then she turned her ', 
side toward me and pretended to look away, but kept me . 
Within the angle of her vision. In a few moments her 
confidence in the harmlessness of the strange stump was 
established, and she played fearlessly in the open, jump- 
ing over low bushes and capering like a young calf in the 
fields. 
Soon the mother came into view, looking for her little 
one, and being older and wiser than little Spotted-sides, 
she had serious doubts about that stump as soon as she 
saw it. She stopped short, alert and suspicious, glancing 
alternately at the motionless figure and at the fawn. The 
instant she caught the attention of the little one, the doe 
turned toward the thicket with a quick movement that said 
almost as plainly as words, "Come along, quick. There's 
dang-er !" Her head was turned over her shoulder to- 
ward the fawn, and her ears were erect and stiffened. 
In that attitude she made one short, quick step. In panto- 
mime of that expressive sort the mother communicated 
her alarm to the fawn. Not knowing why or wherefore, 
the little one bounded to her side, and in a moment they 
were gone like shadows. 
It was worth an afternoon of sitting on a log to see 
that lesson in caution given to the fawn, and to watch 
through the screen of a bush for half an hour the busy 
rummaging of a small black bear through a swamp at 
the foot of the .jglope about a hundred yards distant. 
When the bear had wandered out of sight in his search 
for small game among the rotted logs and tussocks, the 
stump arose, stretched its joints, and went back toward 
camp. 
Early in the morning I tumbled all my duffle into the 
canoe and paddled down stream to the lake, and thence 
back to- the hotel. Why ? Well, mainly because on the 
way back to camp I heard something "spat" against a 
dead spruce a few feet from my head, and picked up a 
.45^90 bullet that had hit the tree hard enough to flatten 
its nose. Air infected by microbes of that size' must be 
unhealthy. 
Arrived at the end of the lake, I beached the canoe, 
gathered up the duffle and went into the hotel, and in the 
doorway I bumped against a man carrying a bag of golf 
clubs. Aversion to the railroad vanished. Any other 
method of locomotion would be too slow to get me away 
from the improved Adirondack lake and its hotels with 
modern conveniences. 
Yet, after all, is^ it anything better than selfishness that 
inspires us — who like to have a whole county to ourselves 
when we go to the woods — with such violent aversion to 
"improved" resorts and summer crowds? The "vaca- 
tioner" who lives in a hotel goes rowing for exercise 
and steamboating for pleasure; who calls a trout-rod a 
fish pole, and is quite capable of losing himself in a ten- 
acre pasture, possibly gets as much pleasure out of his 
visit to the lakes as the woodsman gets out of a season of 
roving in the wilderness. And there are a great many 
more of him. 
It is quite possible that my way of enjoying an outing 
is not so vastly superior to that of the man with the golf 
outfit as it seems to me, and as all we vagabonds of the 
woods are in the habit of assuming. Of course we are 
the elect, and some of us prate a good deal about "love of 
nature," as if that were a special virtue distinguishing 
us from the rest of the crowd and entitling us to special 
consideration, not to say admiration. Perhaps love of 
sociability on a hotel porch also is a virtue, and it may 
be maintained that two barrels of beer are as enjoyable in 
camp as an insufficiency of blankets and a plethora of 
bacon and beans. 
Suppose we substitute for "love of nature," which is a 
badly worn phrase and commonly an affectation, just 
plain survival of the primitive traits in man. But that 
is getting into the domain of philosophy where the trails 
are crossed and hard to follow. The common, every-day - 
selfish human nature of the matter is that I despise an 
"improved" wilderness because the improvements, which 
make it possible for hundreds to enjoy themselves, spoil 
my sport and interfere with my enjoyment of what was 
the day's work, of primitive ancestors. Allen Kelly. 
