“Apple-Tree House, Monday.“Dear Mother-of-Mine, I love Miss Morrison she never said a word though I was bad to-day and talked right out in school. The book was wrong and I was right but that didn’t make it proper for me to talk did it? But Miss Morrison is a Angel and Doris Brown cried because she was sorry for the poor Indians. I love her too. How many kind people there are in the world! I am so happy I almost feel as if I could love Miss Sophia but not quite. Your Little Girl.”
“Apple-Tree House, Monday.
“Dear Mother-of-Mine, I love Miss Morrison she never said a word though I was bad to-day and talked right out in school. The book was wrong and I was right but that didn’t make it proper for me to talk did it? But Miss Morrison is a Angel and Doris Brown cried because she was sorry for the poor Indians. I love her too. How many kind people there are in the world! I am so happy I almost feel as if I could love Miss Sophia but not quite. Your Little Girl.”
The traditional Thanksgiving dinner was a ceremony never omitted at the Spellman homestead, even though there had been years when Miss Sophia had eaten it quite alone, with a determination rather grim than grateful. This year, there were the two elderly sisters, alone in their generation, yet with little in common save their family history and childhood memories, and the little maid from sun-steeped plains of far-off Dakota who sat sedately between them, plying her knife and fork with a decorum that even Miss Sophia could not gainsay. Now and again her black eyes darted keenly from one subdued face to the other, as if in search of something; a“trick,” Miss Sophia said, that made her “as nervous as a witch!”
The long, heavy, and, to tell the truth, rather silent and oppressive meal had come to an end at last, with pumpkin pie and Indian pudding made punctiliously after the old family recipes, and a mold of “quaking jelly,” that had been a favorite of Lucy’s from childhood. After the black coffee was brought in, Stella slid her nuts and raisins into her pocket, and rose at a nod from her foster-mother.
“Mrs. Maloney will wash the dishes to-day, dear,” she said. “You may go out now, or do anything you like for the rest of the day. And I think I hear Cynthia’s whistle,” she added, indulgently.
Miss Sophia sighed aggressively. That clear, boyish whistle was a fresh offense in her ears.
“Go out by the side door, Stella; and,whatever you do, don’t let in that dog with his great, muddy feet!” she commanded; sure that, if Cynthia were coming, Scotty could not be far off.
“Come on down to Doris’ house,” burst out Sin, before the door was fairly open. “It’s always lots of fun down there; her mother lets us crack nuts and pop corn and everything. Mother has a headache again and I mustn’t make any noise around home, and of course it’s solemn as a church here—’t always is. Can’t you come, Jibby?” she begged, anxiously.
(The new name was short for “Ojibway,” invented to tease the little Sioux girl, but Yellow Star accepted it, as she did most things, with quite stoical composure.)
“Yes, I can, Sin; I can do anything I want all the rest of to-day,” she answered, gravely. “But oh! do let’s go to the woods!”
“All right; put on your things quick, and come along! (Down, Scotty! down, sir!) We must stop for Doris, though; and I think Miss Morrison’s there to dinner to-day.”
Stella’s night-black eyes glowed at this, for she silently worshiped her sympathetic teacher.
Arrived at the Doctor’s, they found a large and merry party gathered around the air-tight stove in the shabby parlor, listening with enthusiasm to the warbling of operatic stars on the new phonograph, followed by a “piece” on the piano by demure Doris. There were Grandpa and Grandma Brown, a brisk and well-preserved old couple, with cheeks like rosy winter apples; Uncle Si Wolcott, Mrs. Brown’s eccentric bachelor brother, who lived all alone in a white farmhouse on the “Bay road,” Doris and her father and mother, and, finally, two guestswho were not “kin” to any one else present.
One was Miss Morrison, whose home was in an up-to-date little city in a neighboring State, and who must otherwise have eaten her Thanksgiving dinner rather forlornly in a boarding-house; the other, a lanky boy of sixteen or so, who wore glasses and a thoughtful air, had created some amusement for the giggling girls at the academy by his name, which was Honey. When thus appealed to in the velvet tones of some “lady teacher,” the girls seemed to think it funny. His “front name” was Ethan, and he was an orphan with his own way to make, his nearest relative a none too loving “aunt by marriage,” which explains his appearance on the day of family reunions at Mother Brown’s hospitable table.
The present was not, as Grandpa Brown had more than once remarkedwith apparently a distinct sense of personal injury, a “genoowine old-fashioned Thanksgivin’.” Far from affording the excellent sleighing which had been expected to facilitate family gatherings in Grandpa’s day, and the coasting that had undoubtedly sharpened the youngsters’ appetites for “turkey an’ fixin’s,” an unseasonable Indian summer warmth pervaded this particular twenty-seventh of November. When the young people set out on their walk, Ethan Honey and Miss Morrison being included, they found the country roads soft underfoot, rusty green leaves yet clinging to the wide-spreading apple boughs, with here and there a frost-bitten apple, and even the yellow of ripe corn still nestling in some of the brown stooks that dotted the fields like tattered and smoke-stained wigwams. Red alder berries and gray clematis fringes and the “ghosts of the goldenrod”adorned the wayside, while the purple-brown woodlands melted into a nameless haze upon the lonely horizon line.
“I’m fond of cross-country hikes, aren’t you?” Ethan observed, as he turned to offer Stella an informal lift over the low stone wall that lay between them and a short cut to “Wolcott’s Woods.”
“I do not know that word ‘hikes,’” she answered, in her slow, careful English, “but if it is anything like to-day, I am sure I shall like it very much. I never really knew about Thanksgiving before.”
“Oh, didn’t you?” asked the boy, trying not to stare at his self-possessed little companion, whose cadenced voice and quaint ways, as well as her unusual appearance, might have given him some excuse. “I suppose of course your people don’t keep Thanksgiving,” he added, awkwardly.
“Father and Mother Waring always had the good dinner and the church service,” Stella answered, “but somehow I never understood about the family part. I suppose because I was only a little girl then; or else because they don’t have families out in Dakota! I mean, there are so many lonely ones whose families are back east, with the old houses and the old names and all the old things,” the girl persisted, greatly to Ethan’s secret amusement at her unexpected point of view.
“But, Stella—thatisyour name, isn’t it?” he began.
“It is one of my names,” she replied with dignity. But just then Scotty dashed between them, nearly upsetting both, while Sin followed with scarcely less of abandon, shrieking “A woodchuck! A woodchuck!” at the top of her voice.
“I wouldn’t go any nearer if I were you, Cynthia,” advised Ethan gravely, while Doris and her teacher, calling out futile appeals to “be careful,” lagged breathless in the rear.
“It’s nothing but a horrid old skunk,” Cynthia presently complained, coming back quite crestfallen. “Will you never learn anything, you old dunderhead?” This to the sheepish Sir Walter, whom she had by his collar and the hair of his head.
“When you’ve skinned as many as I have, you won’t be liable to make any mistake,” the boy observed; whereat Doris shuddered visibly.
“You know,” she informed the others, “Ethan skins everything he can get hold of—and cuts them up, too, as often as not—cats and dogs and rabbits and frogs—ugh! He calls it ‘studying biology,’—isn’t it perfectly dreadful?”
“Ethan will probably be a great scientist, some day,” suggested Miss Morrison.
“He’s going to be a doctor, he says,” Cynthia bluntly objected, causing the boy to blush uncomfortably, while Stella regarded him with new respect.
To change the subject, he said something about prairie-dogs, and the girl from Dakota was called upon for an offhand description of these interesting animals, which she gave soberly enough, though making the others laugh with her quaint characterizations and clever mimicry.
Having crossed several fields and followed a farm lane to its end, Ethan let down a “pair o’ bars,” and the company climbed a rocky pasture knoll, where Yellow Star’s quick eye caught something gleaming like dull fire among the dead brown of the bare bushes.
“What is that? It is like a sunset!”she exclaimed, and Cynthia echoed her.
“Oh, what is it? Oh, how beautiful!”
“Bitter-sweet, and the finest I ever saw!” declared Miss Morrison, with enthusiasm. “Oh, oh! was there ever such a mass of it before? Have you a knife about you, Ethan? I simply must have some for my school-room; it will make a dream of a decoration, and last all winter.”
Cynthia and Doris ran about and exclaimed and unwound the most splendid branches, but the Indian girl stood quite still and let the beauty of it all sink deep into her heart. Years later, the sight of a red-gold spray, or even the very name of “bitter-sweet,” brought up that riot of color on the rocky knoll, and the wordless sadness of those veiled and lonely hills.
“Now, girls, we simply must get on,or it will be dark before we can walk to Wolcott’s Woods and back again,” declared Ethan resolutely, shutting his knife with a snap. The whole party followed his lead past a fringe of hemlock, maple, hornbeam and white birch, on to a wild and deep glen that suddenly opened at their very feet, with a foaming brook in its heart. Scrambling down the steep sides of the miniature canyon, they followed the stream to its outlet in a tiny pond, which is flanked on one side by the finest grove of pine in Laurel township.
“This is Uncle Si’s ice-pond,” announced Doris, proudly, “andtheseare Wolcott’s Woods!”
It was so mild that Ethan insisted upon taking off his coat, cushioning a giant log where the girls might sit and rest after their three-mile tramp, while the sun already glowed red through theautumn haze, near to the western horizon.
“Aren’t you glad we came, Jibby?” urged Sin, ecstatically.
“Jibby … another of those names of yours, I suppose,” teased Ethan, gently.
“No, not my name at all,” she told him, holding her head the least bit higher. “My school name is Stella, because it is the Latin for Star. I was called Yellow Star before that, because it is the English of my own name.”
“And that is?”
“I do think you could not pronounce it, but I will say it very slowly. Wee-chah´-pee-zee´-wee—like that. No, the second syllable is rough—in the throat—so!”
“Aspirate,” suggested Miss Morrison; and each in turn tried to pronounce the queer name, with varying success.
“I chose that name for myself when I was four years old,” Stella went on, quite seriously. “I was looking up through the teepee door at the bright yellow stars overhead. I did not like the name the old women gave me; it is a sad name; Ish-na´-nee-un´-lah—The-One-who-was-left-Alive!”
Everybody was listening eagerly, for the brave little exile seldom spoke of herself unless in answer to a direct question, and a curious sort of dignity that she had about her forbade too close questioning. Now it seemed that the unspoken comradeship of the hour had unloosed her tongue, and something, too, of the softness and quiet pathos of the late November afternoon had crept into her expressive voice.
She raised her eyes to the four sympathetic faces that were gazing straight into her own, and the colorrose under her clear, dark skin as she asked:
“Shall I tell you how they came to give me that sad name?”
“Oh, do!” “Tell us, tell us!” chorused the girls; but Ethan sat a little apart, and seemed absorbed in whittling a stick that he had picked up under the great pine.
“You have all heard of the fight at Wounded Knee?” began Yellow Star. “Perhaps you know how they fought—troops in uniform with big guns, against women and children and men whose guns had been taken from them?” (They nodded gravely.) “Well, it was three days after the fight that a party went out from the agency, eighteen miles away, to bury the dead Indians. The agency doctor went with them, and it was he who found wrapped in blankets, in her dead mother’s arms, and lying partly covered with snow—for there had beena snow-storm on the day before—a little baby, alive and crying.
“They threw the mother’s body into the great pit with more than a hundred others; but a kind woman of the camp took the baby home and fed and took care of it. That baby was me!
“That is why I do not know who my father and mother were, or whether I have a single relation in this world. There is no way to find out, for nearly all my father’s band were killed by the soldiers on that day, and there were many babies who died, and no one knows who I am. And that is why the old women called me The-One-who-was-left-Alive!”
That was all. A very simple little story, very quietly told; but somehow no one who heard it had much to say. With one accord they all got up from the mossy log and set out for home. Presentlythey began to talk again about other things, and even to laugh as lightly as before. Just as they parted, Ethan slipped into Yellow Star’s hand the thing he had shaped with his knife from a splinter of pine while she told her story. It was a little, five-pointed star.
“For the land sakes!” exclaimed Grandma Brown, knitting faster and faster, as was her wont when disturbed in mind. “Why don’t that Parker girl’s mother let her dresses down, I want to know? ’Pears to me her legs get longer an’ longer every day! I see her tearin’ down the hill a spell ago, with that outlandish dog o’ hers in full chase, and all I could think of was a hen-turkey with its wings spread out, tryin’ to get away from a fox.”
“Why, mother! Cynthia is only a little girl,” observed Doris’ mother, in quiet amusement.
“Same age as our Doris, ain’t she? When I was young, gals was women atfourteen, an’ expected to quit playin’ with the boys, wear their dresses to their shoe-tops an’ be pretty-behaved.”
“I wish mother’d let me wearmydresses to the tops of my shoes,” put in Doris, demurely. “I’m three months older than Cynthia, anyway.” She had opened the sitting-room door just in time to hear the last speech, but was careful not to commit herself to the rest of her grandma’s program.
“You all going out to your uncle’s place again to-day, Doris?” asked her mother, indulgently. “I see Cynthia’s here, but where are the others?”
“Oh, Stella had her Saturday work to do, and couldn’t get ’round before two o’clock, she said. It’s most that, now,” and she turned again to the window. No one was in sight except Cynthia and Scotty, who were joyously running races up and down the yard.
Here Mother Brown disappeared into the pantry, possibly to put up a bag of her fat, brown cookies, and Doris hunted in the hall closet for her white sweater, while Grandma commented shrewdly:
“That gal’s more of a woman than any the rest of ye, if sheisan Injun.”
“Wolcott’s Woods” had become a favorite resort since that Thanksgiving ramble which had brought the three friends closer together, and the fact that the woods belonged to Doris’ Uncle Si, together with the further consideration that the “new teacher” usually went with the girls, had satisfied their respective mothers of their safety on these excursions. There was talk of snow-shoes and skis, and later of fishing-rods and flower-baskets, but just what went on in Wolcott’s Woods no one knew exactly, for the “Clover-Leaf” was a secret society of three, with Ethan Honey,Miss Morrison and Uncle Si as honorary members.
Presently Stella and her teacher appeared, and the four set out at once—or five, counting in the irrepressible Sir Walter, whose care-free bark voiced the adventurous spirit of the holiday party. It was a warm Saturday in April—one of the few days when our New England spring really opens her heart to the wayfarer, and from time to time they were overtaken by country teams whose occupants gazed curiously, even pityingly, upon them. Once a farmer returning homeward with an empty lumber wagon offered the whole party “a lift,” which proposal was gracefully evaded by Miss Morrison. It always amused her to note that the “natives” evidently could not conceive of any one’s walking for pleasure, or indeed walking at all, unless he were frankly too poor to ride.
“Let’s go round to the house, first,” whispered Doris, hanging to Miss Morrison’s arm, when they were almost there. The child had a coaxing way with her that was not easy to resist; and, moreover, Uncle Si’s late russet apples were not to be despised at this time of the year. So they all wandered up to the side door of the low, white farmhouse, with the square, forbidding front and homely, inviting back premises characteristic of its type.
The door into the summer kitchen stood wide open, and an inquisitive hen or two had actually crossed the threshold; yet repeated knocks brought no answer. Cynthia and Scotty had already dashed off in the direction of the barn-yard, from which there presently came sounds so suggestive of rustic revelry that the others precipitately followed.
“I told him he didn’t dast to ride oneo’ the cows,” shrieked Sin, faint with laughter, “and he’s done it! Look, oh, look! It’s as good as the circus—better!”
Even Miss Morrison couldn’t resist the spectacle of Ethan Honey’s long legs gripping the sides of his reluctant horned steed, his face wearing a smile of mingled triumph and embarrassment as he was borne at a gallop round and round the enclosure, with Scotty yapping delightedly at his heels. In another minute or so, without slackening his speed, the young man had alighted quite informally at their feet. He rose and felt mechanically for his cap, which had disappeared, while he gravely remarked:
“Your house is quite finished. I think I saw a ‘For Rent’ sign in the window to-day!”
The great secret was out! The trio of friends had early felt the commonneed of a tangible house o’ dreams, and now the primitive shelter they craved had taken shape in Uncle Si’s hospitable woods, and chiefly under Ethan’s capable and willing hands.
“Let’s go right over now and have our housewarming,” demanded practical Doris. “Where’s Uncle Si?”
“He went to the store right after dinner,” Ethan answered, “and I’ll have plenty of time to finish my chores after you go. I’ve been helping afternoons and Saturdays for quite a while. Would any of you care for a drink of fresh buttermilk? I churned this morning.”
Well, there are worse things than the soothing acid of that velvet drink to wash the dust from one’s throat after a three-mile tramp. It wasn’t many minutes before Ethan was leading the way to the woods, his pockets sagging with apples, while Sin had stuffed her sailorblouse, and Doris’ sweater was quite knobby with the same.
There were more shrieks of rapture, naturally, when the girls spied their ingenious shack of fresh-cut evergreen boughs, which had been thrust into the ground in a circle and cleverly interlaced so as to make the hut all but water-tight. There was an opening left for a door—rather small, it is true, but still satisfactory—with another, smaller and higher up, for a window; and so neat and careful had been the young builder’s craftsmanship that the ferns on the threshold were scarcely more disturbed than they might have been by the nest-building of a bird.
The party stooped one by one to the oval door, and exclaimed over the fascinations of the shadowy interior, which reminded Yellow Star vividly of the conical wigwams of her people. The littlehouse was quite bare and empty, and redolent of the scent of fern and pine.
“We ought to have a couch of fir-balsam,” suggested Miss Morrison, who had spent a summer in the Adirondacks.
Cynthia proposed an armful of thick moss, while ease-loving Doris declared that for her part she preferred to bring out a hammock.
“What makes you so quiet, Jibby?” demanded Sin, as they stepped forth into the open, under the skyey roof.
“I feel in my heart what I have no words to say,” murmured the Indian girl.
“Our neighbors would be quite as well pleased, perhaps, if we were all as quiet as Stella,” suggested Ethan, quickly.
“What neighbors do you mean? Uncle Si doesn’t care how much noise we make,” remarked literal Doris.
“No; but my oven-bird does,” and the boy pointed out a shy, golden-crownedbird that was apparently reconnoitering the gay party with some anxiety, from behind a sheltering clump of laurel.
“Is its nest near by?” “Oh, show us, do!” came from one and another.
The nest was a curious one, oven-shaped, as the bird’s name would suggest, with an opening at the side through which the first of four speckled eggs could be dimly seen. But Ethan would not allow them to come too near, or linger too long. The little mother was already uttering cries of distress, and feigning lameness to draw them away from her treasure.
“How is your crow doing?” queried Miss Morrison, as they all sat down on the threshold of their “House in the Woods” to christen it with the first social meal. It had been settled that there was to be a stone hearth laid for coffee-boiling before the next Saturday.
“Fine,” Ethan responded, throwing an apple high in the air, and catching it skilfully as it fell. “He can walk ’most as well as ever, and eats out of my hand. I’m thinking of slitting his tongue and teaching him to talk,” he added.
“Ethan found a young crow with his leg broken, by stone-throwing boys, probably, and set it quite successfully,” the teacher explained to Stella, who glowed visibly, but said nothing.
“Well, Doctor, I promise to send for you next time I fall out of the cherry-tree,” crowed Sin, whose climbing days were by no means over, in spite of Grandma Brown.
“Uncle Si is getting ready to go to bed by this time, and we ought to be going home to supper,” announced Doris, soberly, as the April sun dropped into a bank of haze in the quiet west.
“‘Silas Wolcott is dreadful sot,’ asGrandma Brown says,” chimed in Ethan. “Many’s the time he’s been offered a good price, in hard cash, for this bit of pine, but his answer is always the same. ‘It’s been in the family for quite some time: I guess I won’t sell just yet.’
“You know, don’t you, that he’s never missed being in his bed by seven o’clock in the evening, winter or summer, for forty years? That’s just one of his little ways. He’s got lots of them; one’s drinking buttermilk three times a day, and another is never setting foot inside a church. I forget how that started, but they say he stood just outside an open window at Doris’ mother’s wedding! But for all that he’s a good-hearted old chap as ever lived, and I wish he wasmyuncle,” the boy ended, honestly enough.
And the stranger, who was already forgetting her strangeness, secretly echoed the wish.
“Oh, these dear, real people!” she said to herself, as they all turned homeward together, leaving the darling House in the Woods to its invisible neighbors and companions of the night. “They are all so—sofolksy, as Grandma Brown says. It really does begin to seem as if Ibelonged!”
“Oh, Doris, darling! how can I bear it? The very meanest, disappointingest thing that ever happened in this world! Oh, oh!” and poor Sin threw herself face downward on the grass in Doctor Brown’s back yard and sobbed tumultuously. All of her friend’s blandishments were of no effect, and she remained dead to the world until Scotty’s cold nose poked inquisitively into her ear aroused her at last. Springing to her feet, she rebuked him with energy, and only then consented to retail her woes.
“Buffalo Bill’s coming to Westwood next week, and will you believe it, mother won’t take me! Says it’s too hot, andcircuses and such things always give her a headache. And you know it’s been thedream of my lifeto see Buffalo Bill! There now, Doris Brown, see if you wouldn’t cry!”
“Um, um,” was all Doris said, for she was a maid of action rather than of many words. The case, as it seemed to her, was by no means hopeless, but she reserved her judgment.
Having had her cry out and relieved her feelings, Cynthia was soon engaged in a boisterous game with Sir Walter and an old tennis-ball that he had rooted out of some hiding-place or other, while canny Doris slipped into the house and shortly returned with a plate full of Mother Brown’s famous raisin cookies, and a piece of news that quite electrified her impulsive friend.
“Mother says, if your mother’ll let you go with us, she’ll take a party toWestwood to the matinee—you an’ me an’ Stella an’ Ethan an’ Miss Morrison too, if she wants to go,” she calmly stated.
And so it fell out that on the appointed Saturday afternoon in July, a radiantly happy party of six occupied seats in the big tent; the three girls looking their prettiest in simple white frocks, Ethan solemn as an owl in glasses and a natty linen suit, and good Mrs. Brown sweltering in the inevitable black dress of village propriety, but all alike absorbed in the stirring spectacle.
The Rough Riders of all nations and costumes; the wonderful rifle-shooting of the short-skirted, sombreroed cow-girl, the hair-raising hold-up of the ancient stage-coach—each and all yielded a separate thrill; but of course the best of all were the Indians—real, painted, plumed, ferocious warriors and daringhorsemen of the plains! Everybody drew a long breath when they galloped into the arena.
“Doesn’t it make you think of home?” whispered Cynthia to Stella, with characteristic frankness speaking out what the others had only thought.
“Well, you see,” objected Yellow Star, “our men all dress like farmers now, and ’most all wear their hair short.Inever saw anything like this before—except once on a Fourth of July, when some white people paid our Indians to dress up and give a war-dance.”
“But—but they used to dress this way?” faltered Sin, rather taken aback, while the rest pricked up their ears.
“Well, not when they went to war, anyway. They wouldn’t want to be bothered with all those fixings if they really had to ride far, or fight, or anything like that. I think, myself, they onlydressed up at councils and dances, and maybe not quite so much, even then,” (with just a flicker of a smile.) “I know one thing: lots of those beaded things are not Sioux.”
“Not Sioux, my dear! Why, what do you mean?” wondered Mrs. Brown.
“You see, Mrs. Brown,” explained Stella, “most of these very men are Sioux from our agency. I used to hear Father Waring and the agent talking about the show people. There are men at home, and a few women, that have been all over this country and in England and France and Germany. One of them brought home a German wife who didn’t know a word of our language, and he couldn’t speak German, either!
“Now, here they are, dressed up in all the beaded things they could make or beg or borrow from some other tribe—not Sioux at all! To us, that looks as if youwore a fireman’s boots and trousers and a priest’s cassock and a soldier’s hat,” she suggested, with another little quirk at the corners of the serious mouth, but subsided when she observed that several people beside their own party were listening with evident interest.
After the performance, four or five of the Indians passed out among the audience, and as they approached the Laurel party, Yellow Star gazed earnestly into their painted faces. She recognized several, but hesitated to speak to these men, whom, as a modest young girl of her people, she would not have thought of addressing at home, much as she longed to hear again the dear accents of her mother tongue.
At last, however, there came a woman with a child on her back, in its gorgeously beaded cradle, attracting the lion’s share of interest and attention. Many gavethe mother a bit of silver in return for the privilege of a peep at its tiny face, or for one of the highly colored photographs she offered. When she actually held one out to Yellow Star among the rest, the girl couldn’t help murmuring, in the soft syllables of their native Dakota:
“Oh, I am so glad to see you! Don’t you know me? I am from home, too; I am The-One-who-was-left-Alive!”
The woman stared, then seized Stella’s hands eagerly and burst into a flood of low-voiced dialect. The two unconsciously made a picture which was thoroughly appreciated by several of the bystanders. The tall, slim girl in her virginal white frock and modest hat, with the big, black bow tying up her heavy braids of hair, stood glowing all over her expressive face and quite forgetting her shyness, while the sad and rather stolid countenance of the gaudilyattired stranger softened and brightened wonderfully at the sight of a friend.
“Oh, the dear baby!” cooed Yellow Star, presently, lifting a corner of the shawl and looking closely at the little olive face. “But he doesn’t look well!” she exclaimed, anxiously.
“He is sick for two days now, and I know not what to do, for we must travel all time and it is so bad for him,” grieved the mother, looking at her with the pleading black eyes of a hurt animal. “My husband, Young Eagle, he say it is nothing; but me, I not like to dress him up and take around for the white people to stare at when he is sick.”
“Take him back to your tent, now, or wherever you stay, and bring Young Eagle to me. I will talk to him,” flashed Yellow Star, and she turned to her party with an impulsive:
“I must go with her for a little while,please: she is my friend; she is in trouble and among strangers.”
“I’ll go with you, dear,” put in Miss Morrison, quickly. “We will meet you at the station, Mrs. Brown; or no—I must take an earlier train; but there is time to go with Stella and the baby first—” and before any one could speak they were all three lost in the crowd, followed by admiring and envious glances from Cynthia and Doris, who fancied that a glimpse behind the scenes must hold more of wonder and romance than all the rest.
Neither Stella nor her teacher was at the station when the others arrived, and after a thorough search took the 5.40 train, remembering that Miss Morrison had said something about an engagement, and having to leave early, and in any case she would surely have kept Stella with her.
Great was the consternation, therefore, when they reached Laurel and found that Mrs. Waring had seen or heard nothing of her “little girl,” while a telephone message to Miss Morrison disclosed the fact that she had been obliged to hurry away and leave Stella with her new-found friends, who were to see that she met her party at the station in time for the 5.40.
The long, hot, dusty day was sinking into twilight, and the precious waif last seen with a travelling show, in a strange city twenty miles from home! Miss Morrison was conscience-smitten, Lucy Waring in tears, in which Cynthia and Doris were quite ready to join, and poor Mrs. Brown all but overcome by this unexpected ending to their exciting day.
There was no train for Westwood that night. Of course, there were always the telegraph and telephone, but no one knew just how to reach any responsible person,or even whether the “Wild West” might not be already on its way to Hartford or elsewhere. That, Miss Sophia said, was in all probability the case.
“You may be sure,” she announced, with her usual cold precision, “that the wretched child has run away with the show. What else could you expect, indeed, after deliberately putting her in the way of temptation? You will remember that I advised against it from the first. The sight of the beads and feathers and all the rest of the savage finery was too much for her, no doubt, and she will be exhibiting herself in them, if possible, this very evening. Perhaps this painful incident may convince you, my dear Lucy, that you can not make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear!”
After all, the only person to keep all his wits about him in this emergency was Ethan Honey. That youth stopped toconsult nobody, but hastily recollecting that an express train for Westwood stopped at the next town, three miles off, in twenty minutes, he felt in his pockets to assure himself that he had just money enough for the fare, sprang on his bicycle and was off. Breathless and dusty, he arrived barely in time to turn the wheel over to the agent and board the express, which landed him at eight o’clock in the evening, anxious, supperless and penniless, among the flaring lights of the big town.
The corner of the big sleeping-tent allotted to Young Eagle and his wife and baby was untidy enough, with a smell of paints and grease and buckskin on the hot, close air. Dexterously Yellow Star rolled the baby out of his heavy, beaded cradle and took him in her arms.
He was quiet, even for an Indian baby; unnaturally quiet, she thought; and there was a pinched look about the tiny, expressionless features that went straight to her heart.
He was quiet, even for an Indian baby; unnaturally quiet, she thought.Page 88.
He was quiet, even for an Indian baby; unnaturally quiet, she thought.Page 88.
The mother had gone at once to look for Young Eagle, so that for the minute she and Miss Morrison and the baby were all alone in this strange, confused place.There was no chance to sit down, even, and altogether it was queer and uncomfortable.
“They must have a doctor at once,” pronounced Miss Morrison. Then she fidgeted a little, and looked at her watch.
“What shall we do, dear?” she exclaimed. “I have only just time to catch my train if I start at once; and Imustget back early. Yet I don’t know how to leave you here by yourself.”
“But I am quite safe,” Stella answered, rather absently, her soft eyes on the sick baby’s apathetic face. “Young Eagle can take me to the station to meet the others.”
“Then don’t fail to get there by half-past five, and wait for them in the small waiting-room. If they get a good doctor, it will be all right. You’re sure you won’t come with me? Then good-by, dear.” And Stella was left alone.
After long minutes, during which she did what little she could for baby’s comfort, the young husband and wife appeared, he looking rather sulky and shamefaced, but nevertheless yielding to the peremptory orders, issued in crisp Dakota, of the tall, grave-faced girl in White, who had thrown off her hat and was taking full command of the situation. Blue Earth obediently washed some of the vermilion from her round cheeks, and rolled up a corner of the tent to let in the fresh air, crooning over all her troubles meanwhile to this strangely sympathetic listener, who seemed, with the unexpected demand upon her, to have grown years older in the last hour.
When the doctor came at last, it was already too late for the train; but that Yellow Star did not realize at once. To tell the truth, she had forgotten all about Laurel for the time being, and was backamong the simple, lovable, swarthy folk of her earliest recollections. She listened intently to the doctor’s words, which she interpreted with care and intelligence.
“Now, Doctor,” said she, after administering the first spoonful of medicine with her own hand, and giving the docile young mother her final instructions, “if you will come with me and Young Eagle, please, we must find the man in charge and tell him that Blue Earth and the baby can not be in the show again until he is well.”
The child had entirely forgotten herself, and her Laurel friends would have been astonished to see her thus taking the lead and calmly laying down the law to strange men, both white and red.
When she returned from her interview, bringing with her the “boss’s” promise that the woman and child should not be required to appear for three days, orlonger if necessary, supper was served, and she gravely accepted her share of the bread and ham and a thick cup filled with steaming coffee. They ate and drank, sitting upon upturned boxes and still talking—talking in soft elisions of home and the free winds and open skies—home and the childhood scenes that seemed already so far away.
It was dark now; eight o’clock, and the evening performance had begun. Stella learned that the last train for Laurel would leave in an hour, but she had no escort, not even to the station. Everybody was in the show-tent except Blue Earth, and she could not leave the baby. Besides, she knew even less than did our little girl of the mazes of the city streets. She must soon set out alone to inquire her way; and with the thought, for the first time that day, she felt a thrill of something like fear.
Suddenly a familiar face, atop of a tall, boyish figure, appeared around a pile of boxes. It was Ethan, who fairly beamed with relief when he caught sight of her, though he only said:
“Well, little girl, are you about ready to go home?”
“Oh, yes!” she cried, springing eagerly to her feet. “Oh, have you really been waiting for me all this time, Ethan? How kind of you!” and her puzzled eyes rested for a moment upon his mussed linen suit, and then flitted over the strong features, somewhat sharpened by worry and fatigue.
But Ethan did not explain, and Stella was slowly, very slowly, emerging from her dream. There were few words exchanged between the two, as they made their way through back streets to the railway station, after an undemonstrative farewell between the two girls who, ineverything but the common heritage of race, were so very far apart.
Once Ethan asked her if she had had any supper; and again, rather anxiously, it seemed, whether she had money enough for her ticket.
“Oh, yes!” she said at once, handing him her little purse with the ticket and two or three dollars in silver.
He left her for a few minutes in the ladies’ waiting-room, and after he had seen her to the brilliantly lighted train and found her a seat, he handed back the purse.
“I took out fifteen cents, to telephone Mrs. Waring,” he carefully explained. “She will meet your train at Laurel. Now you are all right, aren’t you? You aren’t afraid to travel alone, are you? It’s less than an hour, you know.”
“But what about you, Ethan?” she wondered. “You’re coming, too, aren’tyou?” and she instinctively made room for him beside her, as the train began slowly to glide out of the station.
“I can’t,” he answered, briefly. “Good night, Stella!” and next moment he had swung himself off the step and disappeared in the darkness.
It was seventeen miles through the whispering summer night to the little station where he had left his wheel. He reached it soon after the midnight freight, and found the station agent awake, mounted and rode the rest of the way home, where the first thing he did was to rummage in the pantry for the materials of a satisfactory supper, and the next, to go to bed and sleep ’round the clock.
“I couldn’t borrow from a girl, you know,” was all Ethan said, when questioned about his midnight tramp. “And besides, it was great. Such a lark!”
To himself he said: “I shall never forget the talking leaves, the wood smells, the company of the stars.”
Stella came fully to herself on the short ride home, and was all tender repentance and self-blame when she fell into the arms of her kind foster-mother, on the deserted platform, with the one arc-light shivering overhead.
“Oh, mother! I never thought you might be anxious. I never thought of people looking for me. I’m afraid I never thought of anything but the poor little sick baby—and Blue Earth in such trouble, among strange white people. I wanted to help.”
“Yes, darling; mother understands. And you are safe home, now, thanks to that dear, bright boy. We won’t say any more about it,” answered gentle Lucy Waring.
But, although nothing more was said—for Lucy had contrived somehow to silence even Miss Sophia—Stella seemed to everybody a good deal older, after her Wild West adventure. She was now nearly fifteen, and the eager, child-like wishto belongwas already partly obscured by the more womanly and deeper desireto help. She wrote to Blue Earth, in their own tongue, and received in the course of a week or two a soiled scrawl in reply, saying only that the baby was well now. There seemed nothing more to be done for them, or for any of her own people—not just now, at any rate—and the girl set herself in good earnest to be a real help to the kind people of her adoption.
So she rose an hour earlier every morning, and quietly took upon herself more of the burden of household duties, turning them off so dexterously that Lucy Waring,who had failed perceptibly in the past year, accepted the relief almost unconsciously, and even Miss Sophia had no open fault to find.
“If I could only please Miss Sophia,” grieved Yellow Star. “But I know I never can, for I can’t change myself into something else. She dislikes me because I am Indian,” was the unspoken thought, and it cut deep.
When September came round, Stella entered the old academy with Doris and Cynthia and the rest, and found a new and absorbing world opening before her. Laurel academy was an endowed school, and a really good one, with better-paid teachers and more up-to-date equipment than the little town could have provided out of its own slender resources.
Ethan had been duly graduated and was going away to college, where for two or three momentous years the girls were seldom to see him, since he was “working his way through,” and found it necessary to devote the long vacations to more paying, though not half sopleasant things as doing “chores” for kind old Uncle Si.
The girls had now fairly entered upon a period of life in which boys cease to be “horrid things,” and girls are no longer considered “too silly for anything,” and it soon became evident that, of the three friends, Doris was by far the most mature socially. She was undoubtedly a pretty girl, with big blue eyes, fascinating hair of an amber tint, and a skin like a rose-leaf—a belle and a flirt in her demure, village fashion long before her sixteenth birthday.
Cynthia, to her languid mother’s discontent, but her father’s secret satisfaction, was at the same age a long-limbed, lanky, boyish-looking girl, with decidedly boyish manners, and only the frankest and least flattering interest in the ruder sex. As for Stella, the country youths admired her from a distance,while she, for her part, had no time for them.
“I do despise long skirts; they get in your way so!” Sin complained, as the three were scaling a friendly stone wall on a pleasant Saturday in the following spring, taking their favorite “short cut” to Wolcott’s Woods.
The others laughed. “You do act just like a boy in petticoats,” reproved Doris. “You don’t seem to know how to manage them a bit. There—you’re caught again!” as Cynthia sprang recklessly from the top of the wall, to the accompaniment of a sharp sound of rending cloth.
“I don’t care!” Sin was bent on braving the matter out, and, to her friends’ horror, she calmly tore off a long strip of blue serge and threw it away. “Nonsense; I never mend. Daddy’ll give me a new skirt out of the store anytime I ask him. I hate clothes, and I hate sewing. I’m sure I don’t know why I was born a girl.”
“What shall you wear to the dance?” asked Doris of Stella, as they strolled lovingly side by side. Cynthia, her friends thought, was in a mood that would best be ignored.
“My dotted swiss, I suppose; do you think it will do?”
“Mother is making me a new silk muslin—pale blue; and I’ve got a sash to match and new slippers. It’s two inches longer than my last.” Doris’ voice was full of innocent satisfaction. “You look perfectly stunning in white, Stella,” she added, generously. “And you’re the best dancer of anybody in our set. Isn’t she, Sin?”
Mrs. Waring had insisted upon giving Stella two terms of dancing lessons, with the others, much to her sister’s disgust;and here the native grace of the Indian girl stood her in good stead. It must be admitted that, if she did not particularly care for boys, she did love dancing; it was almost like flying, she thought.
“Um, h’m,” assented Sin, who was born without a sense of rhythm, and never seemed to know what to do with her arms and legs. “I don’t see what either of you want to dance for, though; I hate it, myself. Catch me going to their old party! Give me a warm corner and an interesting story, when it’s too dark to go out. Scotty! Come here at once—here, sir!”
But, as usual, the obstreperous Sir Walter declined to budge, and his mistress found it necessary to follow up and forcibly detach him from a promising burrow.
“What a tom-boy she is! I don’tbelieve Sin willevergrow up,” Doris lamented. “Are you looking for anything in particular to-day, Jibby, dear?”
“Trailing arbutus for Miss Sophia. I believe she’d rather have it than anything; and you know that little warm nook in the pines, south of our House in the Woods? Itoughtto be out, just there,” answered Yellow Star, eagerly, looking as if she would coax the pale buds open with the warm shining of her dusky face.
“Too early; and besides, I don’t see why you’re always wanting to do something special for that cross old maid, Jibby,” objected Sin, who had come back within ear-shot. “Shenever does anything foryou, does she? I’m going to get some flowers for Doris’ mother, if there are any. Her cookies are awfully good.”
“I shall take mine to Miss Morrison,” observed Doris. “But I’ve got to go round by Uncle Si’s first; mother said hewasn’t feeling very well the last she heard, and she told me to be sure and stop. Will you come too, girls, or would you rather go on?”
“I will come,” agreed Stella, at once.
“I won’t, then,” remarked Sin, who was unusually contrary to-day, the others thought. “I can’t bear sick people, and he may be awfully sick for all we know! And then, you never can tell what Uncle Si is going to say next.”
It was quite true. You never could tell; and his first words to-day made both girls jump, coming unexpectedly, as they did, in Uncle’s small, squeaky voice, through the open window of the “kitchen chamber,” where he always slept.
“Look out for the bull, gals! Dunno ’zactly where he is, but he’s certain on the rampage, ’n’Ican’t do a thing. Been under the weather these two days. No,no breakfast, nor supper neither; didn’t want it bad enough to git up ’n’ git it. What’s that, Doris? Wa’al, the door ain’t locked, if yewillcome in.”
In five minutes Stella had a brisk fire going in the kitchen stove, and in ten more the tea-kettle was singing cheerily, toast made, tea put to draw, and two fresh eggs from the hay-mow “coddled” to perfection. She had been well trained in waiting upon a fussy would-be invalid.
Doris had found her uncle lying, fully dressed, upon the bed, covered with a gay patchwork quilt, and looking worried and feverish. She succeeded in arranging his pillows and putting the room to rights before the arrival of the tray; and while Stella deftly helped the old man to take some nourishment, Doris prudently closed both doors and telephoned to her mother.
“There! she’ll see that he’s taken care of properly, if heis‘queer as Dick’s hat-band,’ as Grandma says,” observed his niece. “She’s always saying that ‘for a man to live alone as he does and cook his own vittles is flyin’ in the face of Providence,’ and she ‘hasn’t no manner of doubt that Silas’ll be found dead in his bed, some fine morning.’ Well, I hope not, I’m sure! Now we must go right away and find Cynthia; no telling what mischiefshe’sup to, by this time.”
“Or the bull, either,” thought Yellow Star; but she said nothing, for she knew her friend’s weakness. In the excitement of taking care of Uncle Si, his niece had forgotten all about the bull. If not, Stella knew well that poor Cynthia would be left to her fate, so far as timid Doris was concerned. Why, even the most harmless cow that ever lowed would send her flying from the huckleberrypasture, and folks said the Wolcott bull was dangerous.
So only one of the girls kept a sharp lookout as they passed the open barn-yard gate and crossed the pasture toward Wolcott’s Woods. On its distant verge, a fleck of scarlet showed plainly—Cynthia’s old red cape. And—yes! A lumbering, dark shape had already started leisurely in pursuit of the scarlet fleck.
Stella saw the bull first, and walked on faster. Then Doris saw, grew white as a sheet and instantly turned to run, oblivious of the fact that Taurus had his back toward them, and his eye too evidently upon Cynthia.
“Help! help!” she screamed, as she fled; but there was neither house nor man within half a mile.
Stella resolutely advanced, keeping close to the wire fence that separated the big pasture from their much-loved woods.Cynthia had discovered her danger and was running gallantly, but had not thought to drop her red cape. And she had been caught in the open field, far from fence or tree. Sir Walter had left her side, and was barking hoarsely and making little ineffectual dashes at the bull, that, together with her headlong flight, merely served to provoke his curiosity into wrath. Giving a terrifying bellow, he set off at full speed.
Yellow Star had seen much of wild Texas cattle at the agency, where they are issued to the Indians “on the hoof,” as a monthly ration. Furthermore, Sir Walter had long since learned to obey the girl from Dakota as he never dreamed of obeying his impetuous little mistress. Her flute-like whistle was enough to bring him galloping to her side. Cynthia, too, turned half-way toward her at the sound, stumbled and fell at full length.
The bull was still plunging heavily along, and Stella, who had hoped to draw him off in her direction and then slip through the wire fence out of reach, found scant time for any such maneuver. Desperately she sent Sir Walter flying back to bark and snap at his heels, while she herself stood still and uttered a long ringing cry.
He stumbled, half turned—and hark! the strange, challenging cry was repeated again and again, until it actually brought him to a halt but a few paces from poor Sin, who had struggled to her feet and was sobbing aloud as she tried to run with a twisted ankle. And now the bewildered animal stood pawing the sod and bellowing in hoarse response, until both girls had reached a place of safety.
“Well, thatwasa close call, and no mistake!” Cynthia had quite recoveredher spirits in the course of an hour or so, and was obviously enjoying her own importance as the heroine of so rare an adventure, while she nursed her sprained ankle on the shabby cushions of Doctor Brown’s top-buggy. Poor Doris, still pale and tearful, was squeezed in between Cynthia and the Doctor, while Mrs. Brown remained in temporary charge of her protesting brother, and Stella, who had insisted upon walking, was already far ahead.
The gruff Doctor assented, with an appraising eye, meanwhile, upon the solitary girlish figure moving so rapidly before them, along the hilly country road. The Doctor was not a man of unnecessary words; but if he had spoken out his thought just then, it would have sounded something like this:
“There’s the right stuff in that girl—no question about it! I wonder—”
When Uncle Si, getting “so’s to be ’round” again, heard all about Stella and the Wolcott bull, the immediate results were two.
First, the bull was promptly sold—a surprising occurrence to those who best knew Silas Wolcott and his deep-rooted objection to disposing of any “critter” whatsoever that had been raised on the home place. No fowl was too old or too tough for home consumption, and indeed Uncle had developed no mean skill in softening gallinaceous tissues and imparting a delicious flavor by braising for twelve hours or thereabouts, with peppercorns and sweet herbs, in an old-fashioned bean-pot. But superfluous calves andsuperannuated horses were said to owe their immunity from sale to the fact that they had been “born on the old farm,” a fact which to his mind appeared to constitute a lifelong claim upon its hospitality.
Consequence number two, our heroine was actually adopted, to the extent of being formally requested to call the old man “Uncle,” which she shyly but joyfully proceeded to do. It was one more milestone on her long and often lonely road to “some really true relations.”
Now among the strictly home-bred stock on the Wolcott acres was a small herd of deer, as jealously guarded and almost as tame as if they had adorned the stately park of some English earl. Stella heard with intense, though undemonstrative, interest of this unexpected renaissance of wild life among the New England hills.
“Why, Mother Waring,” she confided, “you know they’re almost gone from our Dakota prairies, where there used to be so many. Think how hard it is for the women to get any deerskin for moccasins! And howcanthere be deer here where white people have lived for hundreds of years?”
“There weren’t any when I was a little girl,” Mrs. Waring observed. “I believe they have come back because for many years now they have been protected; that means, you know, that nobody is allowed to kill them. Seems to me I’ve heard that there are supposed to be several thousand in this State; and now a law has been passed that for one week this fall they may be shot,” she added, doubtfully.
“Uncle Si won’t have his shot,” insisted Stella. “He has printed signs up all over his woods, with something about‘the penalty of the law.’ Mother, I do so want to see a deer! and he says there are three that come to drink at the Cold Spring almost every evening. We’ve seen their tracks—a buck, a doe, and a dear little fawn,” the sweet voice pleaded. “But we always have to come home early so’s to be in time for tea.”
“So you do, darling,” assented her foster-mother, her gentle, puzzled gaze upon Stella’s earnest face. She knew by instinct that the child had a special favor to ask—she who had always found it hard to ask favors.
Out it came at last. “Cynthia is just as wild about the deer as I am; and—and—Mother dear—Uncle Si says we can come some Saturday and he’ll show them to us if we can keep quiet enough; and Dr. Brown has promised to drive us out there and back—Doris too, though Doris is a teeny bit afraid of the oldbuck’s horns—if you’re willing, and don’t mind my being out after dark just this once.” She was quite breathless, now.
“Why, yes, I think so—if the Doctor is kind enough to take charge of you—” Mrs. Waring got no further, for the sentence was interrupted at this point with a strangling hug.
After Stella had actually seen the deer, which happened before many weeks, the four friends had an earnest discussion upon the subject of the coming week of slaughter.
Ethan had lately become quite an adept with bow and arrows, which suggested to him the bright idea of going into the merry greenwood with the romantic equipment of a Robin Hood or a Hiawatha. He rather looked for the admiration of the girls, and especially of Yellow Star, and had even gone so far as to picture himself triumphantly bringing inthe deer on his shoulders, and gallantly throwing it down at Mrs. Waring’s kitchen door. Rather to the boy’s resentment, however, she proved most unsympathetic.
“How can you think of such a thing?” she protested, “and after we have all watched the darling things drinking out of Uncle’s spring! I don’t call it hunting to go out and kill them when they are so tame, almost like pets.”
“I hope you don’t think I propose to shoot on posted land,” remarked Ethan With some dignity. “I know just where I shall go; on the south side of the mountain there’s a regular deer path; and it isn’t like gunning, let me tell you, with the buckshot scattering every which way; and beside, the farmers down that way are glad enough to have the deer killed—they do no end of damage to the young fruit trees.”
“I should say so; why, those very deer that Uncle Si thinks so much of got into the garden one night, and ruined all his early peas,” chimed in sensible Doris. “If it had been his next-door neighbor’s calves, wouldn’t there have been a row, or even a lawsuit, may be.”
“Well, rather,” observed Ethan, glad of a champion. “That’s just why the law was passed providing for one week’s open season; the deer are getting to be regular nuisances all over this part of the state. Pretty soon the farmers will have to build high fences to keep them off the growing crops.”
“It’s letting them think no one is going to hunt them, till they forget to be afraid, and then turning an army of men and boys loose on the poor things all of a sudden, thatIdon’t like,” broke in Cynthia impulsively. “It’s all very well talking about the law, but what dothe deer know about your old law? It isn’t fair, and I hate anything that’s not fair.”
“And it has seemed so like home, ever since I knew for certain there were Wild deer in these woods,” breathed Stella. “Girls, I keep fancying we’ll come upon some wigwams, some time, of those old Indians who lived here two hundred years ago. I suppose there aren’t any bounties offered for their scalps nowadays; and just supposetheyshould come back, like the deer!”
The young folks were picnicking, as usual, in the edge of that bit of first-growth pine that Uncle was so proud of, and at Stella’s words all glanced furtively about, as if half expecting to glimpse a ragged birch-bark dwelling, or even one of the soft-footed braves revisiting his native haunts in these venerable woods. After all, it was they who were the intruders.Ethan looked decidedly shaken, but matter-of-fact Doris remarked bluntly:
“If they did come back, they wouldn’t kill the deer for one week, but every day in the year. I thought Indians were always hunting, when they weren’t on the war-path killing people; andyouneedn’t say anything, Stella Waring, so there!”
However, when the open season actually came round with November, Ethan decided that he was “too busy” to take a day off in the woods, which Stella’s fancy had peopled for him with stealthy shadows, and friendly wreaths of blue smoke from well-hidden wigwams. It was Thanksgiving before they all met again at Uncle Si’s place, and found him “as mad as a hatter.”
“Spent more’n half o’ that week patrolin’ the woods with a shotgun, and givin’ fools that couldn’t read plain English apiece o’ my mind,” he explained, grimly. “Howsomever, the blamed racket scared my deer so’t I’ve never seen ’em since, and most likely I sha’n’t agin.”
“What a shame!” cried Sin, and poor Stella looked too much distressed to speak. She had tried not to think of the timid creatures harried and wounded, of antlered heads laid low, of the blood-drops on the leaves.
“Have you ever noticed this big rock in the middle of the pasture?—noticed it very specially, I mean,” she suggested, as they made their way around the giant boulder, towering high above their heads like a rude altar. “I always think, what if it was right here the Indians used to make their prayers and offerings! Great-grandfather Inyan—that’s what we Dakotas call a rock like that. And there must have been water-spirits—what you call fairies—about uncle’sever-flowing spring. Oh, Cynthia and Doris! I should think you girls would care more about theoldAmerica. You’re proud of being Americans; and there may be prettier stories belonging to these very hills than those we read in school about the Roman nymphs and the old Norse thunder-gods.”
“But where would we find them?” asked Doris, much impressed.
“Try the Historical Society,” Ethan suggested.
“I’m going straight to the library,” proclaimed Cynthia, “and next time we come for a day in the woods, we’ll each of us tell an ‘Old America’ story. What do you say, girls?”
An hour later, they had scattered in search of princess-pine and Christmas ferns, squaw-berries and moss, and Stella, at some little distance from the others,was carefully lifting a clump of hepaticas for Miss Sophia’s fernery, when she suddenly thought she heard a faint, whimpering noise.
The blood fairly crinkled in her veins. Dropping basket and trowel, she set herself to follow up the cry which came again and yet again, a plaintive, muffled, half-human sound that was almost like a baby’s smothered wail. At last her quick eye detected a misplaced leaf. The faint trail led straight to a dense thicket of laurel where a small creature lay motionless, so near the color of the dead leaves in which it nestled that to most eyes it would have been invisible.