“Mine didn’t eat boiled dog, like you Chippewas,” said Edgar. “And far’s Neil’s concerned, my folks are his folks, codfish and all, just as much as your folks is, ain’t they?”

“That’s what you think! Anyway, if you like it or not, Neil, whether you’re a wild Injun or not, you’re descended from Xavier Pic, the smartest man on the frontier, and that’s pretty good, hey?”

“Oh, yes, Gramma, that’s fine!”

But his new-found Indian blood impressed him more than M. Pic’s “smartness.”

He was recalling that, as a small boy, from some forgotten hint or other of Gramma Julie, he had for a while considered himself to have a warlike Indian streak in him. He had boasted of it to Ackley Wargate, and that pale scion had been envious. Yes, a royal heritage, Chippewa bravery; a people unafraid of rocks and nightfall and creeping enemies.

But still—

That might be fine for most people, but not for the conformable husband of Vestal Beehouse. And he was unhappy to suspect that his rare Biddy, that bright being of crystal and rose and silver, was less certainly cousin to English princesses and to demoiselles in robes broidered with the golden lilies than to unbathed squaws in shirts of branded flour-sacking.

–-Wonder how many Indian kids running around reservations and picking nits out of their hair can claim to be Biddy’s cousins?

–-Oh, let ‘em claim it! Might be good for her and me to have some honest-to-God primitive American in us!… Mr. and Mrs. Neil Injunblood announce the engagement of their daughter, Elizabeth Running Mink, to John Pierpont Morgan Wargate, and damn lucky that little prig would be to get her!

He remembered a Christmas grocery calendar and the portrait of an Indian maid with whom, in boyhood, he had been in love: a slim maid complete with riband, beaded doeskin jacket, canoe, waterfall, pine forest, and moonlight, and she seemed not too feeble a symbol beside the fair but weak-minded Elaine simpering over the Camelot traffic.

At last he spoke, and briskly.

“Okay, Gramma, I’m a Chippewa. Do Chippewas get a drink?”

Grampa Edgar cackled, “They do not. They ain’t safe, after firewater, and they get nothing but fried beaver-tails. But any grandson of Ed Saxinar gets a drink—gets two drinks!”

Chapter 12

He said nothing about Chippewas when he returned to Grand Republic. What had seemed a cheery topic with Gramma Julie did not go well with Vestal’s Junior League airiness. He tried to pump his parents, and he guessed that neither of them knew anything about his mother’s ancestry. If Faith had ever known, in her gentle estrangement from Gramma Julie she had conveniently forgotten.

And Julie had given no proof that either Xavier Pic or his wife was Indian, Neil insisted. He insisted a little too often and too strongly.

He kept wondering about the sacred Biddy as a vessel for Indian blood. He had a new, anxious way of watching that Saxon child, and comparing her with her playmates. He decided that Biddy was rougher and more practical than the other children, and in a sidelight, at dusk, he imagined a copper shade on her camellia cheeks.