"It's awfully good of you, and all that, but I wish you wouldn't treat me as if I were a child any longer, old friend!" He placed his hand affectionately upon the kneeling Mukoki's shoulder, and the old hunter looked up at him with a happy, satisfied grin on his weather-beaten visage, wrinkled and of the texture of leather by nearly fifty years of life in the wilderness.

It was Mukoki who had first carried the baby Wabi about the woods upon his shoulders; it was he who had played with him, cared for him, and taught him in the ways of the wild in early childhood, and it was he who had missed him most, with little Minnetaki, when he went away to school.

All the love in the grim old redskin's heart was for the Indian youth and his sister, and to them Mukoki was a second father, a silent, watchful guardian and comrade.
This one loving touch of Wabi's hand was ample reward for the long night's duty, and his pleasure expressed itself in two or three low chuckling grunts.
"Had heap bad day," he replied.

"Very much tired.

Me feel good--better than sleep!" He rose to his feet and handed Wabi the long fork with which he manipulated the meat on the spits.