AN UNEXPECTED MEETING

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 27, 1896

AN UNEXPECTED MEETING.

Professor Marsh’s investigations of extinct animals were conducted year after year in sections of the far west which had not been explored by white men. He had many adventures while he was discovering his 200 species of fossil vertebrates, but perhaps the most interesting was an encounter with an Indian warrior in the Bad Lands, told about in the Youth’s Companion.

The professor, while searching one day for his gigantic six-horned mammals, cretaceous birds, and precious pterodactyls, was separated from the other members of the expedition. He was so busily intent upon his scientific occupation that he did not hear the stealthy approach of a solitary horseman. It was an Indian buck, on the warpath, in full paint and feather.

The professor is a man of high courage, but he involuntarily found himself yearning for the quiet and security of his college classroom at Yale when he was suddenly confronted by this startling apparition. His companions were not within call. He was completely at the mercy of the savage.

The Indian coolly dismounted from his pony, and stood motionless before him, resplendent in paint and with plumes waving. Erect, sinewy, and dignified, he was a splendid specimen of a fighting buck. It was the most uncomfortable moment which the professor had ever known.

“How?” said the professor timorously when the silence had become intolerable.

“Is this Professor Marsh?” asked the Indian in clear-cut English.

“Yes,” answered the professor, completely taken aback by the unexpected identification.

“Of Yale College?” continued the Indian briskly.

“The same,” confessed the professor.

“How is Professor Hadley?” asked the Indian without a moment’s delay.

The naturalist was almost speechless. To be suddenly interrupted in his scientific labors by a buck in war paint and feathers was sufficiently startling. To have the warrior, in place of scalping him, call him by name, and then ask sympathetically for a college associate, seemed nothing less than a miracle. The professor was fairly petrified with astonishment.

But it was a miracle that was easily explained. The Indian had been sent east during boyhood to be educated, and had been befriended and instructed by Professor Hadley’s father. When his education was completed, he had parted pleasantly from the Hadley household, and had returned to his tribe in the reservation.

Instead of profiting by his lessons and experience of civilization, he had gradually been overpowered by tribal pride, aboriginal instincts, and the irresistible fascinations of wild life and war paint. He had disappointed the expectations of the missionaries by reverting to savage conditions.

Nevertheless, he paid civilization the compliment of respecting academic associations. He did not scalp Professor Marsh, but sat down on the rocks and had a pleasant chat with him. He even made an attempt to interest himself in some of the bones which the naturalist had exhumed. And when he remounted his pony, he sent “his kindest regards to the Hadleys.”—The Voice.