With one quick spring she was upon it, and had flung both arms around the neck of a half-grown fawn, which had been wounded in the side, and was too weak to struggle much. Then she raised her voice in a loud cry.
“Ethan! Cynthia! Oh, E—E—than!”
“It’s Stella’s fawn, now,” piped Uncle Si Wolcott. They were all in the big farmhouse kitchen; Stella on the floor with the fawn’s head on her lap, and a saucer of milk beside her; Cynthia swinging her long limbs from her favorite perch on the edge of the table, and the others standing around in admiring attitudes. “Doctor Ethan” had carefully washed the wound, and pronounced it not serious.
“Th’ game warden’s a pretty good friend o’ mine,” he went on, with a twinkle, “and I don’t guess there’ll be any trouble about her keepin’ it for a pet if she wants to.”
The three girls exploded in a simultaneous “Oh!” of delight, but next instant a look of almost laughable bewilderment overspread their faces. The same thought had occurred to them all at the same time. Miss Sophia!
“Do you suppose she’ll let you?” queried Sin in awestruck tones, while the others held their breath. No one but Cynthia would dare to say things right out like that.
“You might have a little house for him, down by the chicken-coop,” quavered Doris.
Stella was thinking hard. No one knew how she wanted the waif for her own; and she felt sure that dear Mother Waring would not—could not refuse her. The question was, did Stella want her to pay the price?
They were all waiting for her to speak, and at last her clear voice broke the silence.
“The fawn is something like me,” it began, pitifully. “You see, don’t you? It’s wild; it hasn’t any relations. I know just how a wild orphan feels, and I’m afraid it wouldn’t want to live in Miss Sophia’s chicken-coop and have her all the time wishing it wasn’t there. Uncle Si, if you would only be willing to let the fawn stay in the barn-yard with the calves, and if I could just call it mine, and come and feed it sometimes?”
There was a soft brightness in the black eyes, as if tears were not far off, and everybody began talking at once, trying to drown the thought of the two “wild orphans” clinging together, and the utter hopelessness of an appeal to Miss Sophia.
“Think the critter’d be most as unpop’lar as Ethan’s rattlesnakes, hey?” chuckled Uncle Si.
“What?” screamed Doris and Cynthia, together, and the boy blushed to the roots of his hair.
“Well, you know, that was a long time ago,” he muttered, but Uncle mercilessly continued:
“Said they wa’n’t dangerous at all, if ye knew how to handle ’em—pick ’em up by the scruff o’ the neck, like blind kittens; wa’n’t that it, Ethan? Studied a heap on the subjick, he had. ‘Uncle,’ says he, ‘they don’t need to eat a thing fer six months to a year;’ an’ I says, ‘There orter be a good bit o’ profit in boarding ’em,’ says I. But Ethan, he says as how he can get five dollars apiece from a museum; and he has a pair o’ boots made to come up to his waist, pretty nigh; an’ he tramps over to Rattlesnake Gulch one mornin’ afore daylight, so as to ketch ’em crawlin’ out o’ their holes, most likely.”
Every eye was fixed upon the speaker, except that of his victim, who wriggled uneasily and vainly tried to break into the conversation.
“Ethan allers did go in fer makin’ money, ye know,” pursued Uncle, enjoying his success. “Wouldn’t take along any whisky fer bites, though I offered him all I had left, sayin’ as how it was a wuss pizen than the snake’s an’ not accordin’ to modern methods. Wal, along about dark Ethan comes back pretty well tuckered out, carryin’ a gunny-sack over his shoulder on the end of a stick. Didn’t need to tell me there was a live rattler in that there gunny-sack! I could hear his tail a-goin’ like an alarm-clock, an’ every now an’ then he’d strike out kinder vicious an’ set the thing to wavin’ back an’ forth.”
“How did you ever get him into the sack, Ethan?” begged Cynthia, much excited. Doris shuddered, and hid her face in her hands, while Stella sat quite silent, with the fawn’s head in her arms.
“Mischief of it was to git him out agin,” remarked Uncle. “Ef Ethan ever got that five dollars, I will say he arned it. Just tell ’em what your aunt by marriage said when she stumbled over that gunny-sack in the woodshed an’ found out what was in it, Ethan.” But Ethan had slipped out to the barn, and was fixing up an unused box-stall for Stella’s fawn.
“Gone, is he? Wal, all I can say is, Miss Sophia Russell ain’t a circumstance to Mis’ Honey on that occasion. Don’t know as I blame her, neither. That pet o’ yourn’ll be safe enough with your old uncle, Stella, an’ you’ll be out to tend to it every Sat’day, or I’ll know the reason why.”
“It doos beat all,” declared Grandma Brown, with even more than her usual emphasis, “how blind own folks can be! I’ll lay there ain’t a man, woman nor child in Laurel township, save an’ exceptin’ Sophi’ Spellman, that don’t know Lucy’s goin’ straight into a decline. Weak lungs is in the fam’ly, to begin with; I can rec’lect when those gals’ mother an’ aunt both went off with the gallopin’ consumption. Like as not, Lucy felt her husband’s death a good deal; an’ I’ve heerd tell how that Dakoty climate keys you right up till ye can’t live anywheres else without snappin’ off short.
“She’s ben goin’ down stiddy ever sence she come back home, that’s flat; an’ here’s that sister of hers tellin’ folks as how ‘it’s jest a touch o’ bronchitis,’ an’ ‘she only wishes she had Lucy’s constertution.’
“What’s more, she has her breakfust in bed reg’lar, so I hear, for all the world like them ungodly folks in furrin parts, an’ reads French novels on the sofy while Lucy an’ Stella doos up the work. I declare for’t, Emmeline, if somebody else don’t do it pretty quick, I’ll speak to Sophi’ myself!”
Everybody knew that Grandma had succeeded in preserving to a good old age all the “spunk” and “snap” that seems to have perished, for the most part, with a past generation, and it is quite possible that, if opportunity had served, she would have faced down and outdone even the formidable Miss Sophia. Lucy’s decline, however, had been so very gradual, and her ways so quiet and uncomplaining, that even a sister might almost have been forgiven for not realizing how matters stood. As for her dear Sioux daughter, now a head taller than herself, and completing, to the eminent satisfaction of her teachers, her second year’s work in the academy, to her it had seemed a sufficient explanation of everything that “mother was growing old!” For the fifties, and even the forties, of ripe middle age do seem “old” to sixteen.
After almost three years in Laurel, Yellow Star was growing fairly certain that she truly “belonged.” Modest as she was, she could not help knowing that people liked her—all sorts of people—boys and girls and babies, intimates and strangers, sharp-tongued Grandma Brown and the gruff-spoken Doctor and “pernickety” Uncle Si. Even from Mary Maloney and Rosey Bernstein the Indian girl had wrung some measure of reluctant admiration; but, in spite of much willing service, she remained vividly conscious of being still an outsider and an interloper in the eyes of Miss Sophia.
Now at last Doctor Brown had been sent for to see Lucy Waring. Everybody in Laurel, almost, had noticed his ancient roan steed and battered top-buggy before the Spellman gate. It was impossible to deny any longer, in the face of that long-postponed confession, what all the village tongues had been wagging with for months past. Lucy had “took to her bed,” at last, and the end could not be very far off.
It came suddenly, after all; to Yellow Star with a suddenness almost as devastating as that storm of bullets and shell out of a clear sky which had left her stranded, a nameless brown waif, on the frozen December sod, some fifteen years before.
The spring term had slipped quickly away, with Miss Ward installed as nurse and Doctor Brown calling every other day; with Miss Sophia looking grimmer and grayer than ever, and Lucy’s waxen face on the pillow relaxing into a loving smile as she repeated the daily formula which only Stella really believed:
“I shall be better to-morrow. Now the weather is getting so pleasant, I shall soon be out again.”
Then, one sultry July day, after a long “spell” of exhausting heat, there had come an alarming faintness and a “hurry call” for the Doctor. Miss Sophia was hastily sent for from the kitchen, where she had been taking the indignant Mrs. Maloney to task for “nicking” her old blue china … and presently, to poor Stella sitting, desperately anxious and unhappy, on the top step of the dark stairway, just outside her foster-mother’s door, came, not even kind-hearted Doctor Brown, but the business-like, white-capped nurse, with her curt message:
“Miss Sophia says you need not sit there any longer, Stella; Mrs. Waring is dead.”
Now, indeed, it was all Miss Sophia’s house, she thought; and it “pushed her out,” as she had said once when she first came to Laurel—pushed her away as with actual, bodily hands—a dark-skinned little alien, who did not “belong”! All of a sudden, she realized with dreadful sharpness that she was nothing, really, to that gentle soul who was gone, and who had pityingly taught the childish lips to call her “mother.” No, she was no Waring except in name—much less a Spellman or a Russell; those ghostly portraits in the shuttered parlor below disowned and despised her; she was only a stray—a foundling—only The-One-who-was-left-Alive.
Yellow Star sprang up and darted down the colonial stairway and out the sacred front door. The graveled, box-bordered walk echoed her flying feet, and the elm-trees, straining against a rising wind, seemed to peer anxiously after the light figure as it sped by. Then the gate clicked and she was away—away on the wings of the summer wind—not walking, scarcely even running, but flying toward the only near refuge her spirit knew, the dear, green, lonely House in the Woods!
Long before she could reach it, the storm broke. It was a storm that made timid Doris cower with her face hidden, there in her own mother’s cheerful sitting-room; even the weary Doctor thanked his stars that he had gotten safe home and his horse “put up” before the rain came.
Yet it was not those silvery sheets of hissing water, drenching to the skin all who might be abroad, that one really minded—not at all! It was—ah! the play of forked lightnings, awfully bright, and the ear-splitting thunder-crash that could do no harm, one knew, but that was so dreadful for all that. Yellow Star’s Indian blood fairly curdled within her in the face of this close strife of the elements; for brave as her people truly were, the angry moods of nature were to them full of threat and awful personality. And yet, to-night, her grief was such that even the forked tongues of the “Thunder Birds” could not really terrify her, and she ran on.
In the rude shelter raised by friendly hands and connected with some of the happiest hours of her short life, there among the grave neighbor pines hiding their frightened nestlings, the girl from far Dakota cried aloud in long-forgotten Indian fashion—cried and mourned in rhythmic cadence, wild as the sobbing wind in the tree-tops—there told in her own dear tongue to those shivering sister woods all the secrets of her storm-tossed heart.
“Oh!” she cried, standing straight up in the tiny shack and flinging her strong young arms above the streaming black head with a tragic gesture, “oh, it is worse even than when I lost my own mother and was too young to know! I only knew what they told me—how they threw my poor Dakota mother into that awful pit, with no coffin and no prayer—and how I could never, never know her name or how she looked, or whether I was all the child she ever had, or anything! And the white man’s cruel bullets had torn her poor body … and yet in all her pain her last thought was for me … to keep me warm and alive. I meant to prove that I was worth keeping alive … and I hoped she might, somehow, know.
“And then, there were those kind Indian women—Blue Earth’s mother, and Mrs. Driving Hawk, and the rest, who took care of me as well as they could. They were poor and very frightened and most had babies of their own, and it was very, very kind of them to feed a useless little fretting baby without any relations, whose people had nearly all been killed by the soldiers of the Great Father at Washington.
“To be sure, I have often heard my dear Mother Waring say that when she found me I was very dirty, and looked hungry and miserable. Many of the Dakota children who had mothers and fathers, too, were hungry, and ’most all were dirty, I’m afraid, back there on the reservation. It wasn’t all their fault; I know it wasn’t.
“I was about five when Mother Waring took me away; very thin and ugly, and oh! so frightened of the white people! She used to tell me about it afterward, to make me laugh. She had my ragged little Dakota dress and moccasins put away, the ones I had on the day she took me home to her house, and washed and dressed and fed me, and put me at night in a clean, white bed next her own. I cried half that first night, she told me, and begged to go back to the Indian camp, where I might curl up in a dirty quilt in any one of half a dozen smoky teepees.
“Then, after awhile, I got fat and contented, and I loved her dearly, and began to be afraid of the Indian women. But she wouldn’t have that, either; she always made me shake hands with them, and wouldn’t let me forget my own language when I learned the English. And I went to church and Sunday School and learned about Our Father who art in heaven; and after a great while Father and Mother Waring seemed just like my real father and mother on earth.
“Then dear Father Waring left us and went to heaven, too; and we came to Laurel to live. It’s been beautiful here; all but Miss Sophia. I have so many friends in Laurel—I really did begin to think I belonged—and if I could only stay long enough to graduate, there are so many things I could do.
“But now I seem to see it all. Now Mother Waring is gone, I haven’t any folks, anywhere. Miss Sophia doesn’t love me a single bit. There are just Doris and her father and mother, and Cynthia and Grandma Brown and Uncle Si and Miss Morrison—yes, Ethan too, though I haven’t seen him for ever and ever so long—all just friends, not folks,—and I shall be left out of everything, again. Oh, dear! I am nobody’s little girl!”
After supper that same evening, when the summer tempest had subsided to a gentle, purring down-pour of warm rain, and while Yellow Star, scarcely yet missed from the gloomy house of mourning, lay exhausted with crying on her bed of boughs, in her wet garments, away out in Wolcott’s Woods, her good friends were discussing her future and the practical bearings of her great loss, with true village simplicity.
“It’s jest as I say, an’ you can depend on’t,” insisted Grandma Brown. “I ain’t missed a funeral in these parts—not for forty-six years—that time I was bedfast, you recollect, Grampa? and old Deacon Hewitt went and turned up his toes. Furthermore, there ain’t ben a will made in Laurel all these years that I couldn’t tell ye the heft on’t.
“Deacon Spellman, he left that house an’ money in bank to his two darters, Lucy an’ Sophi’, an’ whichever one of ’em was to die fust the hull went to the survivor. You’ll find out it’s so; an’ everything belongs to Sophi’ Spellman now, onless Lucy an’ her husband had contrived to save suthin’ out of his pay, which wasn’t no great, it stands to reason, him bein’ not only a minister but a missionary to the heathen.”
“I don’t know but you’re right, mother,” the Doctor admitted, taking his pipe out of his mouth and resting his grizzled head on the worn leather cushions of his chair, with a tired sigh. “I do kind of hope, all the same, that some sort of provision will be made for that child to finish her schooling. I should hate to see her packed off to the Indian reservation now, when her heart’s set on graduating; and Stella deserves to graduate if ever a girl did.”
“Of course I’m right, Ezry,” observed Grandma, crisply. “And packed off she’ll be in short order, or I miss my guess.”
“It seems to me Sophia will want to do what’s right by her only sister’s adopted child,” was Mrs. Brown’s gentle suggestion, while Doris cried quietly, with her head buried in the sofa pillow.
“Seems to me, Emmeline,” Grandma countered, briskly, “you’d orter know Sophi’ Spellman better by this time. She’s her granther Spellman over again; anybody outside the family connection was allers the dirt under his feet, in a manner of speakin’. Stella’s a good gal, an’ a smart gal, but she’s no kin to Sophi’ that I know of. An’ furthermore, she ain’t even white folks, an’ no Spellman by birth and nater could put up with that—not if she had the parts of an angel. Jest you wait an’ see.”
And, as usual, Grandma had the last word.
It was on the very day after the funeral that Miss Sophia had an unexpected caller, in the person of Cynthia’s father, the proprietor of the largest dry-goods and grocery store in Laurel. She privately wondered what he had come for, but received him with a civility as chilling as the atmosphere of her shrouded “best room,” and as unbending as the tall, spare figure in its gloom of unrelieved black.
Mr. Parker was a man of business, and went straight to the point.
“I hope you’ll excuse my calling so soon, ma’am! I should be very sorry to intrude, but the fact is, I am particularly interested in—ah!—in a present member of your family.”
Here Miss Sophia visibly stiffened, and the gentleman cleared his throat, and made a fresh beginning.
“If I may be allowed to refer to the prospects of your—ahem! of the late Mrs. Waring’s charge, I understand that it is proposed to—that her return to Dakota is—ah!—under consideration?”
“As to Stella,” reluctantly responded Miss Sophia, “I do not quite see—begging your pardon, Mr. Parker—why my plans for the girl should be of particular interest to my neighbors. However, I have no objection to answering your question. Stella is sixteen—quite old enough to go to work, and, thanks to my sister’s possibly mistaken kindness, has a far better education than either her antecedents or her circumstances call for. It is high time, in my opinion, that she was getting in touch with her own people, and becoming accustomed to their mode of life, to which she has so long been a stranger.
“Her own inheritance from an ancestry of savages, Mr. Parker, betrays itself in such escapades as Stella indulged in on the night of my sister’s death, when she ran away to the woods in a violent thunderstorm, was found by your dog, I believe, and brought home after dark by Mr. Silas Wolcott from his place on the Bay road. Such distressing outbreaks render it desirable, certainly, from my point of view, that her return be not delayed too long.”
“That’s about as I supposed, ma’am,” gravely assented Mr. Parker, “and it is on that understanding that I have come here to-day to make a definite proposition to Miss Stella, and to you, as her guardian. It is simply this: that I offer her a home with me, as my daughter’s companion, for the next two years, or until she graduates from Laurel academy. She will be treated precisely like my own daughter, if she comes. I shall make her an allowance for dress, and so forth, and of course pay all of her expenses.”
Poor Miss Sophia was taken entirely by surprise, and had to moisten her dry lips more than once before she could inquire:
“And what, may I ask, is your reason for this—this extraordinary offer?”
“Miss Stella, ma’am,” responded Mr. Parker, with unmoved politeness, “is, as you are perhaps aware, my daughter’s most intimate friend. Cynthia is an only child, and, I am sorry to say, rather a lonely one. She has her little peculiarities, Miss Spellman, like the rest of us, and her mother and I have every reason to be satisfied with your ward’s influence.” (Here Miss Sophia indulged in an unmistakable sniff.)
“In addition to this, my daughter firmly believes that Miss Stella saved her life from the Wolcott bull, not a great while ago, which of course puts us all in her debt; and, in short, Cynthia says that she will not graduate without her.” (Another sniff.) “And besides,” firmly continued Mr. Parker, with perhaps a secret enjoyment of the situation, “the fact is, ma’am, her friends all feel that Miss Stella is a girl of—ahem!—unusual abilities, and ought by all means to complete her education.”
“Of course, Mr. Parker, I shall require some time to think this matter over.” Miss Sophia spoke rather feebly, after a long pause. “The suggestion is an unexpected one, and—and—However, I shall mention it to the girl, and—By the way, Mr. Parker, you may not be aware that my sister left her by will all of her personal property, and a sum in savings-bank amounting to something over three hundred dollars. Stella is not exactly an object of charity.”
The storekeeper was quite aware of this fact, as was everybody else in the village. The will had been drawn up by the local lawyer, who had deemed it necessary to keep his counsel no longer than till the funeral was over. However, Stella’s friends did not think the legacy of great importance, as bearing on the question in hand. Three hundred dollars was a nice little nest-egg for her, to be sure; but it would not cover her board, clothing and school expenses for two years.
He simply bowed, therefore, and took up his hat as he replied, civilly:
“Certainly, certainly, ma’am; take all the time you wish to talk the matter over with the young lady. When you and she have made up your minds, may I ask that you will communicate with me?”
At Miss Sophia’s front door, the merchant encountered Doctor Brown. Almost a personal encounter it was, for the big Doctor was in a hurry, as usual, and had stopped in upon urgent business, on his way to a patient. Miss Sophia was just on the point of escaping to her room, to consider this unprecedented interference with her plans—rank impertinence, she was inclined to call it—when he bluntly detained her.
“No, no; I can’t sit down. I sha’n’t keep you a minute. It’s just this. Stella Waring must have her chance. She must graduate from the academy, in the first place, and her little bit of money won’t do the trick. My wife and I aren’t rich, as you know, but there’s room under our roof for the child, especially if she’s willing to make herself useful—and I know she is, bless her heart!
“She can come to-morrow; we need her to wait on mother, help my wife about the house and be company for Doris, so she’ll give as much as she gets. Stella’s proud, Miss Sophia, and wouldn’t consent to be a burden to anybody. I want her to understand that she’ll be doing us a favor by coming. Talk it over with her, and let me know. Good day!”
Well, there was no way out of it; the whole matter must be laid before the girl herself. Distasteful as the task was, Miss Sophia must explain to her both offers and give her her choice; yes, and the further alternative of remaining where she was for two years longer. Upon mature consideration, and with her eyes fully opened, at last, to Stella’s position and value in the community, this stiff-necked elderly Puritan was compelled to face the fact that the girl’s services were worth as much to her as to any one else; and the further fact that it would not “look well,” in the eyes of her lifelong neighbors and townsfolk, if her dead sister’s foster-child should be obliged to find another home in Laurel. She could scarcely be packed off to the reservation willy-nilly; not with such influential friends on her side.
Besides, it would be some satisfaction to get the better of that scheming Mr. Parker. Let him take his own medicine, and see how he liked it. And besides, when you really came down to it, what would she, Miss Sophia, do without her light-handed and swift-footed little attendant? Poor Lucy was gone, and Stella was the only one, now, who knew all their ways. Must she be at the mercy of a Mrs. Maloney in her old age? So for hours she sat and thought till her old head fairly spun, and the subject was broached to a subdued and red-eyed Stella that very evening.
“Oh, Jibby darling! to think of your really and truly coming to live with us! Oh, isn’t Daddy the very nicest man that ever lived? He never refused me anything; not if I had set my heart on it, you know. And I told him that if you didn’t graduate, then I wouldn’t, either; and the very day I was eighteen I was going out to Dakota to join you on your own land, and run that ranch we always talked about. He only said: ‘Tut, tut, daughter; we’ll do better than that.’
“And even mother’s glad, because I do bother her sometimes when she has a headache, and now she can play bridge all day, if she likes. You and me’ll see to everything, won’t we, Jibby? You are coming, aren’t you, darling dear?”
Thus Cynthia in one breath, flinging herself upon her friend’s neck the next morning, in the prim garden of the old Spellman homestead, among the old-fashioned posies, day-lilies and bleeding-heart and wonderful rose-hued peonies, while Scotty, with the demonstrative jealousy of his kind, stood upon his gaunt hind legs and thrust his cold nose between the loving pair.
Doris, prettier than ever in all the dignity of her ankle-long skirts and “Psyche knot” of honey-colored hair, noted Stella’s hesitating silence and cannily began, feeling her way:
“You know, Jibby, Grandma is getting old and feeble, and she does like you better’n ’most any one. She won’t let even me do for her as she will you, Stella Waring! I don’t see how you manage to bewitch everybody the way you do.
“Uncle Si says, dummed if he wouldn’t like nothing better than for you to come out there and be his little housekeeper. Think of that! He never forgot that breakfast you got for him the day Cynthia was chased by the bull; and he says that for nobody else in this endurin’ world would he have hitched up the critters long after bed-time of a wet night. I don’t know when he’s been out after eight o’clock ’cept that night he took you home. Well, aren’t you ever going to speak? We all want you, Stella; now which is it going to be?”
Yellow Star faced her two friends with almost a tragic gesture of out-flung arms, and the rare tears in her soft, black eyes.
“Darlings,” she cried, “you are all too sweet for anything, and I shall never forget it as long as I live. To think that I have such friends! But do you know, the most wonderful part of it all is, Miss Sophia wants me too!
“She’s getting old, you see, and she isn’t used to doing for herself, and she really does need me, girls. Don’t look like that, Cynthia; she’s my dear, dear Mother Waring’s only sister—the only near kin she had in this world—so she used to say. Girls, I know I should be perfectly happy with either of you, but I can’t leave Miss Sophia—she’s folks. I know I can take care of her, and here is where I belong.”
And, of course, that settled it.
Miss Sophia, notwithstanding the unexpected turn that affairs had taken, had by no means relinquished her point of view. No sooner was she satisfied that Stella would not desert her post for any other offer, however flattering, than she recovered herself sufficiently to make quite clear to the girl her changed footing in the Spellman household.
“Our work is light,” she announced, coldly, “and I shall expect you to earn your board. I have no doubt you prefer to be independent, as far as possible. I will pay such bills as are necessary, but there must be no more extras nor nonsense, mind. As for clothes, you’ll scarcely outgrow them now, and my sister kept you so generously supplied that I should not think you would need anything new for a long time. A girl in your position must not expect to dress as well as a prosperous man like Mr. Parker or Dr. Brown can afford to dress his daughter.”
Yellow Star said nothing, but she was not slow to take a hint, and she made up her mind then and there never to ask Miss Sophia for a dollar or a new dress. Neither did she want to draw any of her precious money out of the savings-bank where Mother Waring had placed it for her, on their first coming to Laurel.
She was quick and capable; all the housework for two, except laundry and heavy cleaning, now fell to her share, and took up nearly all her time, out of school. However, there was the long summer vacation to plan for; and in the spring after Mrs. Waring’s death, Stella began to seek and to find opportunities for earning small sums of money. She delivered hats for the local milliner and gowns for the village dressmaker. She took a neighbor’s baby out in his carriage on fine days, at ten cents an errand or an airing. One April afternoon, Doctor Brown found her on her knees with basket and trowel, grubbing up dandelions in Miss Sophia’s front yard.
“She pays me a cent apiece, because she doesn’t like to see them in her grass,” Stella explained, gravely. Miss Sophia had at least a sense of justice, and although she exacted full service of the orphan, to the utmost equivalent of her modest living, she would not ask her to do out-of-door work without paying for it. She had been going to hire a boy for the dandelions, and Stella had begged for the chance.
“Why, my child, you’ll soon be a Crœsus at that rate,” laughed the good Doctor.
“I really need the money for a new dress,” pursued Stella, who was thoroughly in earnest. “Miss Frost, the dressmaker, would like to have me help her in my spare time; I can make good buttonholes, and she’ll pay me thirty cents a dozen. But I would so much rather do something out-of-doors. You see, I am indoors nearly all the time, with my books and the housework, and I’m starving for some fresh air.”
“Ahem!” The Doctor cleared his throat and took the matter under consideration. He would have dearly liked to put his big, generous hand in his pocket and buy the new dress, but he was half afraid the child wouldn’t take it—or, even if she would, how about that dawning sense of personal independence? No, no! let her earn the dress, especially since she was wisely choosing the open-air tasks that should soon restore its color and roundness to the eager, appealing young face.
“Sensible girl!” he approved. “Do you know, Stella, those dandelion roots you are digging have medicinal value? The wholesale drug-stores will pay you a few cents a pound for them, when they’re properly washed and dried. There’s burdock, too, and tansy, and—let me see—wild mustard and boneset, beside several more. You must gather the seed-pods of the mustard, and the leaves and tops of boneset and tansy. They’re all worth money; and all as common as dirt hereabouts. The farmers ought to pay you, too, for helping to get rid of them; almost every one I’ve named is a troublesome pest.”
“Oh, Doctor Brown! How perfectly splendid!” Stella clasped her long, brown hands eagerly, still kneeling on the soft turf, and once more the dull glow crept up in her quiet cheek. “I know them all now except the tansy, and you’ll show me that, won’t you? And tell me just where to take them. It will be exactly what my own mother and her mother must have done many a time—digging roots and herbs for medicine. There’s nothing else in the whole world I should like so much.”
“Yes, it was I set her up in business, and a fair sort of business it’s turning out,” chuckled the Doctor some three months later, from the depths of his shabby easy chair. “Not a fortune in it, of course; but she makes seventy-five cents or a dollar many days, with Cynthia’s help. Why aren’t you out with them, Doris? Afraid of a freckle or two my girl? Well, health is beauty, and their long days in the sun and air, close to the life-giving earth, will be worth more than a fortune to them.”
Doris tossed her pretty head, from her favorite perch in the broad window-seat, where she was putting careful stitches in the daintiest of shirt waists.
“The hot sun and the stooping over give me a headache,” she complained. She loved Jibby as much as ever, of course, but the sacrifice of that apple-blossom complexion to the Sun-God was too much to expect.
“When I was a girl,” her mother observed, “I used to be told that it made a young girl coarse and blowsy to expose her skin to the wind and sun. Why, I never thought of going out in summer without shade-hat, gloves and a veil; and nowadays the girls won’t wear any one of them.”
“I d’ know what the present generation’s comin’ to,” agreed Grandpa Brown, discontentedly. “This new-fangled idee of livin’ outdoors is suthin’ I don’t take no stock in, fer one. Houses was made to be lived in, says I; more specially for the wimmen folks. It used to be thought ondecent to sleep aout; an’ if folks had sot a table in the back yard for comp’ny, you’d of said they’d gone plump crazy. I dunno whether ’twas Stella set the fashion, or mebbe that school-teacher from up-state that was always gassin’ ’bout ‘fresh-air;’ but anyhow, Laurel’s got the disease, an’ got it bad.”
“When him an’ me went to house-keepin’,” chimed in Grandma, briskly, “folks nailed all the winders down hard an’ fast before ’Lection day, an’ never took the nails out till spring cleanin’. We didn’t hold with warmin’ all outdoors, like they ’pear to nowadays. Considerin’ them nailed-up winders, an’ the things we ate an’ drunk, an’ the germs we hadn’t never heard of, I’ve never rightly onderstood, Ezry, how you ’count for Grampa an’ me bein’ as peart as we be, an’ both on us goin’ on for seventy-seven.”
“Speakin’ of vittles, I ain’t never felt the same sence they took away my pie for breakfust,” grumbled Grandpa, and everybody laughed.
Doctor Brown lit his pipe and retired behind the newspaper, but found himself thinking less about State politics and the rise in certain stocks than about the new idea that his father had unwittingly let fall. Yes, there was no doubt about it; it was his little favorite and Miss Morrison, between them, who had boldly thrown open the windows and waked up the sleepy children in stuffy school-rooms, who had set the fashion of long cross-country walks among the younger set, had revived toboggan parties and skeeing and “one-day camps,” who had, in short, conducted an effective “anti-tuberculosis campaign” under the disguise of “fun.” He had not realized before how much they were all indebted to that natural hunger for fresh air, so naïvely confessed by his “outdoor girl.”
“Though it is bad for my business—and the undertaker’s,” he humorously admitted to himself.
On that same midsummer day, Stella herself, with loyal Cynthia at her side and Scotty acting alternately as scout and rear-guard, was harvesting a field yellow with feathery wild mustard, down at “Uncle Si’s place.” That eccentric bachelor had offered to pay handsomely for the extermination of the weed by gathering its seed, and this bounty, together with the market price of five cents a pound, had spurred the girls to unusual exertions.
The work was hard, and they had been at it steadily for two or three hours, when, with shoulders that ached from stooping and faces glowing with heat, they straightened up at last, and looked longingly over toward the cool shade of Wolcott’s Woods.
“Let’s get a drink at the spring, and then sit under that tree awhile and rest,” begged Cynthia. “I’ve got some sandwiches and a splendid book in my pocket.”
“Well,” consented Stella, “I suppose we might. You’ve helped like a Trojan, Sin, and I ’most know I’m going to have money enough for my new fall suit. I don’t want to disgrace our class, you know,” she added, merrily.
But long before they reached the giant maple that cast its green shade over a far corner of the field, Sir Walter began to bark wildly, and to make excited little dashes forward and runs backward, after his usual idiotic fashion when trouble was in the wind.
“What do you suppose is the matter with him, Jibby?” Sin demanded.
Stella gave a long, searching look ahead and calmly answered:
“There’s a man lying down under that tree.”
“A man! Oh, Jibby! what shall we do? Hadn’t we better run home as fast as we can?”
“Let’s go a little nearer and see who it is, first,” suggested the other, suiting the action to the word.
“It’s a tramp, or somebody dreadful, I know,” Sin declared, but she would not desert her friend, and both girls, escorted by the cringing Sir Walter, drew near to the prone figure of a poorly dressed, black-bearded man, whose hat, stick and bundle lay at his side.
“How perfectly horrid he looks!” Cynthia shuddered under her breath. “It’s a tramp or a nasty peddler, and he’s either drunk or asleep. For goodness’ sake, Stella, don’t go any nearer!”
“He looks sick to me … and hungry … and out of work,” her friend pitifully declared. “Perhaps he hasn’t any place to go. He can’t hurt us, and Scotty would protect us, anyway. (Down, sir!) Get some water, quick, Cynthia! he’s had a sunstroke or something,” and she bent over the “horrid man” and loosened his coarse shirt at the neck, moistened the livid face with the tin cup of cold water that Cynthia hastened to fetch, and fanned him with her broad-brimmed hat.
When in a few minutes he came to himself, he was barely able to speak, and that in a broken sort of lingo that the girls could make little of, but dog-like gratitude looked out of the lusterless black eyes. Stella’s strong young arms helped to raise him to a more comfortable position, and Cynthia knelt down and eagerly fed him bits of bread-and-butter from her lunch-box.
“Go to Uncle Si, please!” directed Stella. “He will know what we ought to do. I shall stay here, with Sir Walter to take care of me, till you come back.”
But it was while she was still patiently fanning the stranger and trying to piece out a meaning from his foreign looks and words, that Stella was attracted by fresh activity on the part of the dog, who had lain apparently asleep at her feet. She looked up, and saw a tall, lightly built young man coming rapidly toward her, his serious face breaking into smiles as he noticed her start of pleased surprise.
“Why, Ethan! is it really you? Where did you come from?” she cried, springing to her feet, but quite forgetting to hold out her hand. The Sioux are not demonstrative in the matter of greetings.
Ethan, however, did not hesitate to take prompt possession of the little brown hand and press it warmly for a minute, as he looked into the soft, child-like eyes which met his with the old simplicity.
“Gad, but she’s a winner! Just about twice as handsome and ten times as magnetic as she promised to be, two years ago,” thought the boy, but he only said:
“Oh, I just ran down for a few days to see Uncle Si and all the folks! College opens in three weeks, you know—my last year. Uncle and I were busy talking over old times and the prospects of the crops, and the convivial moment had just arrived with the buttermilk, when Cynthia appeared, all out of breath, and from her story I judged I’d better come and look after you without loss of time.
“So this is your tramp, eh? The poor chap looks harmless enough, to be sure, but for all that it was a risky thing to do, for a girl. I suppose you ‘wanted to help’ like that time I had to fetch you home at ten o’clock at night from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West—do you remember?”
The girl’s rich color deepened a trifle under his openly admiring eyes, as he added, pleasantly:
“He’s better now, thanks to the little Samaritan; a green Polander out of a job, I should say at a guess. Suppose I toll him over to Uncle Si’s place and try to persuade the old fellow that he wants an extra hand?
“But if you often get into such scrapes, I don’t see how you could keep it up very long without me to help you out, Stella.”
Among the hoarded possessions of gentle “Mother Waring” which fell to her little girl, was a large and varied collection of Indian photographs. Stella had often turned them over and over, with almost painful interest; she did so once again; and after choosing with great care a single one, laid all the rest away.
The picture that now stood conspicuously on her old-fashioned bureau was a large one taken in Washington many years earlier. It showed a group of three strong faces belonging to leading men of the Sioux in the middle of the nineteenth century—the last, indeed, of their tribal leaders, trained in native ways.
“I don’t think that’s a very pretty picture,” remarked Cynthia, carelessly, one day when the three friends had gathered in Stella’s little chamber up under the eaves. “Why didn’t you pick out that one in the beaded shirt and eagle-feather war-bonnet down to his heels?”
“I liked the cunning little baby in its mother’s arms,” Doris suggested.
“Or that perfectly splendid young Indian man who’s in college somewhere, going to be a minister,” persisted Sin. “Seems to me these old Indians in long hair and plain clothes are rather a hard-looking crowd,” she added.
It was often difficult for Stella to explain herself. She was silent now, but her cheeks took on the dark flush they wore when she was deeply moved. Cynthia saw it, and hastened to add:
“After all, though, there’s something pretty fine about them. That one in the middle, now; isn’t he sort of solid and hard and grand, like a big, gray boulder—or—or a charging buffalo?”
“I like to look at them every day,” murmured Stella, at last, with a grateful glance. Cynthia always understood; perhaps not just at first, but in time she was sure to understand. “You see, girls, those were real men; strong and just, faithful and truth-speaking. They were men who talked little and did much. We younger Indians who float along like chips on the current need to keep before our eyes the old strength of our race. Those faces seem to me carved, as you say, just like out of solid rock.”
A day or two later, a little knot of academy girls were all trying to talk at once, in excited voices of which only snatches could be heard.
“I shouldn’t think she’d want to push herself in where she isn’t wanted…”
“Nobody’ll speak to her if she does come.”
“Just as if our crowd cared to associate with shop-girls and—”
Apparently it was all an affair of the social club with the mysterious initials, which had held regular meetings since their sophomore year. It was a club that took pleasure in being exclusive, and had little regard for the point of view of the excluded. How foolish it was of them to feel sore or resentful! Rosey Bernstein, undoubtedly a star pupil, was vulgarly witty at the expense of the club and its unimportant secrets and foolish little mysteries.
There had never been any question about Stella’s membership—Stella whom she and two or three others had been inclined to persecute in the early days, but had given it up when they found to their surprise that the word “Indian” was held a title of honor, rather than a term of reproach. In scholarship they were neck and neck; but what won Rosey completely was the Indian girl’s unaffected admiration of the fat Bernstein baby, of whom the whole family was inordinately proud. Babies were Stella’s weak point, anyway.
But we are losing sight of our conversation, which concerned, not Rosey or Mary Maloney, but a little girl who had been obliged to drop out of her class in their Senior year, and go to work in the factory to help support a large family.
Poor Milly was so slight, so shy, so unpretending, that it did seem as if she might have been allowed to slip in without remark among her more fortunate classmates, on the Saturday half-holiday. It was soon settled, however, that she was “not their kind at all,” that it had been all a mistake having her in the first place, and she must be made to feel that now she had left school she ought of course to resign from the Club. There being no dissent from this proposition, the girls were about to take up the programme for their next meeting, when a clear young voice with the least bit of foreign accent suddenly broke in upon the talk.
“Girls, I’ve been reading in an old book how the New England Indians made the first white men welcome and gave them the best they had, and how the poor exiles here and in Virginia would have starved many times if it hadn’t been for the Indians’ corn. I wondered, just at first, why they did it, because the strangers were so different, and you know we don’t usually like people who are a different color or race or even dress or live differently. And then I remembered that we Indians are always taught to be kind to strangers—to feed even our enemies if they come to us hungry or in trouble—what you call hospitality. The Christian white people don’t teach their children hospitality, do they?”
There was a minute’s surprised silence.
“After all, girls, it won’t hurt us a bit to let Milly come whenever she can; prob’ly it won’t be very often,” hesitated Doris.
“Have any of you seen her lately?” Cynthia broke in. “She was always little, you know, but now! Why, there’s nothing to her at all. She looks just as neat and nice as ever, but oh my! Just as if she didn’t get enough to eat. Her father doesn’t work regularly, you know; and her mother was in the hospital six months; Milly earns three dollars a week and has to work from seven in the morning until six at night, except Saturday afternoons and Sundays. I asked her why she hadn’t been to Sunday-school lately, and she said she spent all day Sunday washing and ironing her clothes, because she was so tired she simply couldn’t do it evenings; but I think it was partly because she dreaded meeting the girls she used to go with.”
Here Doris began to cry quietly, and the other girls, who were really good-hearted enough at bottom, looked so ashamed of themselves that Stella slipped away as soon as she could.
“There’s one thing more I must speak about, girls,” she said, as soon as the three inseparables were out of hearing. “You know I haven’t taken my turn at entertaining the Club—and this is our third year—and each of you has had them at your house two or three times. I’ve been thinking and thinking.”
“Oh, don’t, Jibby darling!” cried Doris, distressed. “Nobody expects you to entertain; we all understand.”
“Everybody in Laurel knows Miss Sophia,” declared Cynthia, with bitter emphasis.
“I can’t help it; I must do something for the others, just once! No, I can’t ask Miss Sophia to have them at her house, even if I buy all the refreshments with my own money. She is very particular about her floors—and the dishes—a cup might get broken or something. But oh, Doris! do you suppose Uncle Si—?”
“Why, of course! why didn’t we think of it before? A picnic in Wolcott’s Woods; why, it would be just scrumptious!” interrupted Doris, while irrepressible Sin seized an arm of each and whirled them round and round till all were laughing and out of breath.
“How about a week from Saturday?” “It’s nearly always fine, this time of year.” “How will you get us all out there?” “What shall you have to eat, Jibby?” Poor Stella was fairly buried under the rush of eager questions and exclamations.
When the great day came at last, a perfect afternoon in late September, Uncle Si’s springless farm wagon, cushioned with golden oat straw and drawn by a pair of sleek, black horses, rumbled merrily from door to door through the village, taking in some fifteen happy passengers. The first surprise came when it was found that not only shrinking little Milly, but every girl in the class was of the party. It had been Stella’s shy request to have the “undesirables” as her personal guests for the day, and that innocent little remark about “Christian white people” had somehow made it uncomfortable to refuse. The “B. N.’s” had yet to discover how much more satisfaction there is in getting people in than in merely keeping them out.
The democratic “straw ride,” a revival of an all but forgotten fashion, took exceedingly well, and it was a well-shaken-together crowd that tumbled out at Uncle’s “spring house,” where delicious, ice-cold buttermilk, sweet milk, or pure spring water was served to everybody. Of course, the girls’ throats were dry from much singing and shouting, so that nothing could have been better.
The next stop was at the big hay-barn, where all were invited to hunt for eggs in the clean, sweet-smelling mows. This was great fun; and when the eggs proved to be hard-boiled, the plan of this progressive picnic began to declare itself.
At the kitchen door, which stood invitingly open, stood a beaming neighbor woman with a bucket of steaming coffee and a basket of fried chickens, done to a turn, and these were quickly conveyed to the near-by apple orchard, where a few boards and sawhorses had been converted into a rustic table, fancifully decorated with ferns and autumn leaves in Cynthia’s original style.
But the nicest surprise of all was a blazing bonfire at a convenient distance, with—yes, it was actually Ethan, attired as an Indian brave and lavishly feathered, bending dutifully over it, flanked by a mammoth heap of late roasting ears.
After the substantials had been consumed, somebody offered a prize for the biggest apple, which was easily won by Cynthia, the best climber and biggest tom-boy in the crowd. Meanwhile, a huge, frosted cake had appeared upon the table, Doris’ mother’s contribution to the feast, and Ethan slyly suggested that treasure was sometimes found in woodpeckers’ nests, which led to another joyous scramble, and the discovery of handfuls of pop-corn balls and Shaker sweetmeats in tempting hollows of the old apple-trees.
By-and-by the whole company gathered in a circle around the dying bonfire, and Cynthia, with apparent unpremeditation, proposed an hour of story-telling.
Doris set the ball rolling with the very old tale of the Ash and the Elm, the father and mother of mankind, as told by the Abenakis, the Indians of New England. Both trees grew in Uncle’s door-yard; and her hearers, looking up, seemed to realize for the first time the graceful femininity of the drooping elm, and the sturdiness of the more robust and straight-limbed ash-tree.
“There was once a chief who had three daughters,” began Rosey, promptly, “and the youngest daughter was much the prettiest, so that all the young men wanted to marry her. After all, she married the Turtle, who was very lazy, and lounged about the camp-fire while the others fished and hunted. They all hated him because he had won the handsomest girl in the village, and yet did nothing to keep her. One day, they caught him out of sight of home, and at once told him that they had decided to build a big fire, and roast him alive.
“‘Ah, that is what I like!’ boasted the Turtle. ‘You can’t get it too warm to suit me.’
“Then some one suggested that they had better drown him instead, and the Turtle appeared to be much worried. He cried and begged for mercy, but they seized hold of him in spite of his struggles, and threw him into the lake near by.
“‘Ha, ha! now I am at home!’ exclaimed the Turtle, and he dived down into the cool water and left them all gaping and angrier than ever.”
After everybody had laughed at the expense of the disappointed suitors, Cynthia began the story of Lox, the mischief-maker, who one day uprooted a wild plum-tree and set it on his head, so that he scattered ripe fruit as he walked.
“Pretty soon,” related Sin, “he met two fun-loving girls, who begged that they too might be allowed to wear such charming and surprising head-dresses.
“So Lox planted on each of their heads a small plum-tree, by his magic power fastening the roots firmly in their long black hair. The girls went home very proud and pleased, and soon found themselves the talk of the village.
“After a while they grew tired of being pointed at, as well as of carrying the plum-trees on their heads, and each tried to pull the other’s tree out by the roots. They pulled and pulled with all their might, and at last they got them out; but, because all their beautiful hair was pulled out too, the girls cried bitterly, and wished they had not been so foolish.”
So it went all round the ring; and when it came the turn of their hostess, she could scarcely speak for surprise and pleasure in the pretty compliment to her well-loved people. After she had capped the climax with one of her best Dakota tales,[1] they were all delighted to hear the sound of a rustic, rollicking dance-tune played on the old fiddle by Uncle Si himself, who had certainly entered into the spirit of the occasion with all the zest of a boy.
Uncle was sitting out on the side porch in his shirt-sleeves, and there was a nice, level stretch of turf inviting to the dance. Tune followed tune until everybody was out of breath, and the frolic ended with a weird, make-believe “Ghost Dance,” and a most realistic scalp-dance, in which the girls held at arms’ length one another’s fallen tresses, while going through steps and figures that would certainly have put an Indian brave to the blush.
The sun was getting low when the straw-lined Cinderella’s coach, driven by Ethan this time, drew up at the farmhouse porch for its happy freight of tired girls. It really did seem as if the class of 19—— had never known each other so well before, never felt so close to the soil and so pleasantly alive to the spirits of the past, as after they had shared the hospitality of the Indian girl and her big-hearted Uncle Si.