“You needn’t be scared!” Lewis exclaimed, for Moses was getting his rifle. “He’s somebody you know. Guess who he is! Guess! Guess! Hurry and guess—only you’ll never guess! And he got me out of the river!”
The captain and Lincoln stared with all their eyes, as Lewis and his big rescuer came aboard, the Indian grinning broadly and offering to shake hands.
“Me come see my son,” he announced in good, but halting, English. “Me James Claiborne one time. Now me Sam Hokomoke.” “He’s a chief,” added Lewis, excitedly. “A Chickasaw chief.”
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“James Claiborne!” ejaculated Marion.
 
“GUESS WHO HE IS! GUESS!”
He was incapable of another word. He simply stood and stared.
“Jimmy!” shouted Moses, dashing past into the cabin, “Jimmy! Here’s your pa!”
Marion had mechanically reached out and grasped the Indian’s hand and was bewilderingly shaking it. As soon as he recovered himself a little, he released it and allowed Lincoln to follow his example.
Lincoln spoke with much gravity. “You don’t say,” he drawled. “No wonder his robber friends told Jimmy that his pa would know him by the resemblance, when they fixed him up.”
James Claiborne, or Sam Hokomoke, drew himself up slightly, and the smile died out of his face at this reference to his having robber friends.
“Now you’ve offended him!” said Lewis, angrily. “I tell you he’s a big
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chief in his tribe, though he isn’t dressed in his war togs.”
“Oh,” murmured Lincoln; “just a social call. Well, we’re mighty glad to see you, Sam Hokomoke, or James Claiborne, whichever name you like the best, and we know Jimmy will be.”
“We are very glad to have you here,” said Marion, rousing from his stupefaction to his responsibilities as captain. It was almost impossible for him, any more than for Shadwell Lincoln, to accept him as a white man, like themselves. He had lost all resemblance to a white man at first glance. He was the color of seasoned leather, and the fact that he had fallen into the Indian ways of speech in his seldom practised English, made it seem as if he could not possibly understand everything they said as easily as they understood one another.
“We have missed you,” continued
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Marion, realizing that this was an absurd way to state the case, but unable for the life of him to think of a better one.
James Claiborne grinned again. He had said more already than he was accustomed to, and apparently Marion’s statement did not strike him as being in need of any verbal acknowledgment.
“Here’s Jimmy!” shouted Moses, dashing out of the cabin in front of him, like a herald before a royal pageant. “Jimmy, here’s your pa!—Ain’t it the greatest thing you ever set your eyes on?” he whispered to Lincoln, as he squeezed close in to the quickly thickening group. “Think how Jimmy set out to find him, and the dangers he went through, and the suffering, and to have his pa just come strolling aboard—and a regular Indian chief!”
“I guess I had some hand in it,” said Lewis, darting a scornful look at Mose.
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“H’m! Might have knowed you’d be grumbling because you ain’t the whole show,” retorted the ever-ready Mose.
Considered as a consummation, such as Moses described it, the meeting between Jimmy Claiborne and his father left a good deal to the imagination. Jimmy had advanced forward, thrust from behind, forcibly, rather than moved by an impelling filial emotion. Within arm’s length of the big Indian he came to a dead halt. The pressure from behind had withdrawn itself, leaving him rooted to the deck. He was face to face with his father, but it took a shrewd physiognomist to discover it. James Claiborne Hokomoke, on his side, made no advance. The traditions of fifteen years among the Indians may have made the American observances strike him as inadequate to the occasion. Perhaps he would have preferred to hold some sort of council, and sit in a circle for hours, before a word
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was spoken on either hand. The arksmen grew fidgety. Jimmy grew red. Some intuition of this embarrassment evidently stirred the white man’s brain in Hokomoke, bringing with it a train of more or less faded and obliterated memories.
“You my son?” he asked.
Jimmy hesitated. “I reckon I am,” he answered, deprecatingly. He did not mean to appear doubtful, but he was embarrassed. A more positive answer would have seemed to him pushing—like attracting attention to himself. His eyes strayed imploringly to Marion, but the young captain had stepped back to give him the entire floor.
“Humph! Ugly!” was his father’s comment.
There was a moment of astonishment at this unexpected sally. With his long scalp and forelock and the rest of his hair in half grown tufts, and the paint only partly worn off his face, Jimmy’s appearance
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certainly was not such as to make a parent proud. A great laugh went up from the men, in which Sam Hokomoke joined as heartily as any one, and with that laugh the atmosphere of constraint cleared, and Jimmy felt at ease.
The white man, who had so unaccountably turned his back on his family and disappeared for so many years, was almost indifferent to the news they poured into his ears about Fish Creek and its people. He asked no questions, but he listened with some show of interest to the things they told him of his father, and Maria, his wife. He accepted the hospitality which Marion extended him, but expressed no enthusiasm when it was proposed that he should return with them to Fish Creek in the autumn. He made no further explanation of his reluctance than might be gathered from the simple comment, “Squaw good,” and he had no messages for Maria, although to his father
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he sent several long speeches, beautiful with Indian symbolism and sentiment.
“But how on earth did you meet each other, and where in the world have you been?” asked Marion of Lewis, when they were floating down the river again, and a reserved relationship had established itself between Jimmy and his father.
“Been chasing along the bank,” replied the boy. “I ran by you last night. Didn’t you stop somewhere?”
“We stopped and went back to look for you,” replied Captain Royce.
“That was when I went by you, and didn’t know it!” exclaimed Lewis. “Then after we had run a long way, Sam Hokomoke climbed up that high bluff and saw ye comin’ down-stream. And I tell ye I was glad!”
“But how came you ashore in the first place?” exclaimed Moses. “Did you jump ashore when the tree fell on us?”
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“No, I didn’t!” replied Lewis, shortly. “I didn’t have a chance. I went head foremost into the river! But that wasn’t the first of it,” Lewis added. “The whole bluff slid down to begin with, and Sam Hokomoke with it.”
“Didn’t I tell ye that there was someone up there?” Lewis interrupted himself to say to Moses. “Didn’t I say so?”
“You said you believed there was a buffalo up there,” Moses admitted.
“I said ‘something’ was up there,” insisted Lewis. “Well, ’twas Hokomoke”—somehow it seemed impossible to call him by the name of Claiborne. “He tossed them little stones down to attract our attention, just for fun, but when the bank caved in he was as surprised as anybody, I guess, for down he came with it, head first; but he gave a mighty jump, and landed on the ark roof, within three feet of me. I thought he was going to scalp me, and I
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clinched him—for there was no chance to get up my gun.”
“Was that when you said, ‘You red scamp, you?’” exclaimed Moses.
“Maybe,” replied Lewis. “I don’t know what I said. I thought he meant me, and I clinched, and Tige jumped for him, too. But just then something struck us. D’ye say ’twas a tree? The whole roof went smash, and Tige and me and Hokomoke went heels over head into the river.
“I guess I’d ’a’ been drowned sure,” Lewis continued, more soberly. “I went down, down, down, and swallowed considerable water. I thought I never’d come up; but when I did, he had me by the hair, and was makin’ for the bank with me. He got out and pulled me out. I thought he had only hauled me out to get my scalp, and I tried to break away from him. But he began to say, ‘Me no kill!
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Me no kill! Me white man,’ Tige, too, never once offered to bite him after we got ashore.
“As soon as I found I hadn’t got to fight, I began to look for the ark,” Lewis went on, “but it had gone. I hallooed four or five times, but couldn’t hear anything of you, though I heard somebody, whose voice sounded like Mose’s, away down the river. We sat and rested a while, and then Hokomoke gave me a pull by the arm, and said, ‘Me go catch white man’s boat.’ And we started after you through the swamps and cane—an awful place to get through in the night. I don’t believe I would ever got down here if it hadn’t been for him. I told him about us, and then he told me who he was. That’s all.”
In spite of their efforts to keep him longer, Sam Hokomoke took leave of the arksmen the next day at a camp of his tribe near the fourth Chickasaw bluff.
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“It’s cert’n’y curious,” said Jimmy, as they watched him disappear, waving his hand and grinning back at them, “to think I have a father who is a full-fledged Indian chief, and that I have an invitation from him to visit him or call upon him for assistance whenever I please.”
“The strangest part of it is that the Spaniards have treaties with them against us Americans, and that they’re our worst enemies,” said Marion.
No adventure worthy of note now befell them for a number of days. They passed the mouth of the St. Francis River and many natural meadows, or prairies, at several of which settlers’ cabins had recently been built. Here they were sometimes able to exchange corn and wheat for eggs, poultry, bear meat and venison.
In two days the mouth of the Arkansas River was passed. At the new settlement of Palmyra they tied up for a day and a
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half, in order to obtain larger sweeps and to mend the roof of the ark. The next day the Grand Gulf Hills came in view, and during the afternoon both Captain Royce and Shadwell Lincoln found that all their skill and experience barely sufficed to keep their heavily-laden craft out of Grand Gulf Eddy.............