The preacher listened with sympathetic attention.
"Poor little fellow," he said, at the end. "It someway makes me think
of a thing that occurred near Bullionville. I was called to
Giant-Powder Gulch to give a man a decent burial. He had been on a
three-days' spree, and then had lain all night in the wet where the
horse-trough overflowed, and he died of quick pneumonia. Well, a man
there told me the fellow was a stranger to the Gulch. He said the
dissolute creature had appeared, on the first occasion, with a very
small child, a little boy, who he said had belonged to his sister, who
was dead. My informant said that just as soon as the fellow could
learn the location of a near-by Indian camp he had carried the little
boy away. The man who told me of it never heard of the child again,
and, in fact, had not been aware of the drunkard's return to the Gulch,
till he heard the man had died, in the rear of a highly notorious
saloon. I wonder if it's possible this quiet little chap is the same
little boy."
"It don't seem possible a livin' man--a white man--could have done a
thing like that," said Jim.
"No--it doesn't," Stowe agreed.
"And yet, it must have been in some such way little Skeezucks came to
be among the Injuns," Jim reflected, aloud.
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