Biddy, he noted, was abnormally good at playing that the living-room couch was a canoe and paddling it with a tennis racket—with no especial advantage to the racket; she was masterful at walking stealthily, at breaking out in ungodly whoops; and when she and he built a bonfire to celebrate the thaw at the end of April, he noted that both of them were competent with hatchet and bark kindling.

–-Maybe this isn’t just a game. I really do see Indian traits in both of us.

Then, as he watched Vestal sewing beads in a small pair of moccasins for Biddy, he absent-mindedly observed, “Only an Indian would think up patterns like that.” He remembered then it was not the Beehousely Vestal who was to be studied and detected as an Indian, and he saw how sumptuously spurious all his discoveries had been. And he most illogically triumphed, proved that neither he nor Biddy really did have “Indian blood.”

But even if they had—well, he now remembered hearing that the admirable Judge Cass Timberlane was part Sioux, and that it was something or other called the “genes” which carried racial appearances, not the blood.

Learnedly summing it all up, Neil decided that (1), he probably had no Indian blood or Indian genes or whatever it was and (2), it wouldn’t matter if he had, but (3), he wouldn’t mention it to Vestal and (4), recalling Gramma Julie’s swarthy gracefulness, he was sure that Biddy and he were as Indian as Sitting Bull, and (5), he had now completely lost interest in the subject and (6), he was going to find out for certain, as soon as he could, whether he did have any Indian blood and/or genes.

* * * * *

His second business trip to Minneapolis was on Monday, May 7th, and on that day exploded the premature announcement, confirmed a day later, of peace with Germany. While the motor-horns and the flat-voiced church bells were strident in prairie villages along the railway, the car Borup was blazing with jubilation. Strangers shook hands and drank from pocket-flasks together and patted Mac the porter on the shoulder and, all standing, they sang “Auld Lang Syne.”

Judd and Eliot and Rod Aldwick would be coming back now, Neil rejoiced. He would no longer be friendless and unadvised. It was only, he assured himself, because he had been lonely that he had “taken this Indian nonsense so seriously.”

But Jamie Wargate would not be coming back. No one would find out where he lay in Germany, under an airplane engine, his fine hands a pulp that was one with the battered steel.

Neil’s friend of the transport, Captain Ellerton, would not be coming back. He, least prim of all young men, was prim now under a prim cross in a graveyard like a suburban lawn.

* * * * *

His talks with the Minneapolis bankers and politicians done, Neil marched himself over to St. Paul, on Wednesday morning, to see Dr. Werweiss, official in the Minnesota Historical Society, whose building was beside the great bubble of the Capitol dome.