[1] For the story told by Stella, see “Wigwam Evenings,” by Charles A. and Elaine G. Eastman.
The three “Clover Leaves” will never, never forget their last year at the little old academy. The square, white tower with its peremptory, sweet-toned bell that dominated their waking hours and all but ruled their dreams; the arm-in-arm saunter from school through autumn’s mellow haze, or gay exchange of greetings on the crisp winter air; the stiff portions of Latin and French and mathematics sweetened with girlish mirth and nonsense; the Senior dance and the Senior play and all the new-made dignities of that momentous year—these still haunt the charmed halls of memory, among the sweetest ghosts of life’s phantom past.
And with it all, with all the modest ambitions and the innocent vanities, there was mingled many a longing or an anxious thought of “what next”—of the real problems that lay beyond that mysterious closed door.
For most of the boys the next thing was work—just plain, every-day work on the farm or in the shop; for a few, both boys and girls, it was college or normal, and then school-teaching or another profession. Doris and her mother had no thought but of the dear home duties and the small social triumphs that beckoned so plainly, when the pretty, only daughter should have “finished her education.” But Cynthia and Stella were of a different mold, and they passed many a happy hour in sharing their confidences and their dreams, which ranged all the way from that ranch in Dakota on Stella’s allotment, which they were to run together, riding their own range triumphantly in the approved cow-girl fashion, to the glorious vision of Stella as a famous doctor and Cynthia as a great artist.
The modest business in herbs and simples had led its votary to pursue her botany a little further, and make a special study of medicinal plants. She was often discovered hidden away in a corner of Doctor Brown’s office, eagerly comparing “Gray” with the “Materia Medica;” and she found, too, that Grandma Brown was more than ready to impart the neglected virtues of mullein and catnip, dock and sassafras, some of which Stella tested by personal experiment, while the girls began teasingly to call her the “Yarb-Doctor.”
Doctor Brown secretly believed nothing beyond the capacity of his favorite, but he conscientiously meant not to encourage ambitions that it might be impossible to realize.
“Those hands of Stella’s,” he impulsively remarked one day, when her future was under discussion, letting his sage eyes rest meditatively upon the long, supple, sensitive members—“well, they do say such hands can only belong to a doctor or a musician.”
“Or a mother,” unexpectedly murmured his wife.
He gave her a quick, approving look, and again the warm blood glowed in the Indian girl’s dark cheek. She suddenly remembered how Ethan had been telling her of his plans to study medicine the next year, and how she had listened with all her heart in her face, and at last cried out without thinking:
“Oh, I wish, how I wish I could be a doctor, too!”
She remembered vividly the peculiar look in his eyes as he gently answered:
“I could wish it too—unless—unless you were meant for something even better, Stella.”
And she had not understood at all.
Before the March sun began to melt the snow-drifts, Stella’s friends got together privately and laid their plans to present her with her Commencement Day outfit. She had worn all winter the trim suit and modest hat purchased with her summer’s work in the fields, after the rows of drying shelves in Miss Sophia’s garret had been cleared of their aromatic burden. And oddly charming she looked in them—like a symphony in browns, with her gleaming agate skin and the intense black of hair and eyes for contrast. But the “weed money” was all gone, and there was no time for extra earning that last, busy year. Surely she could not be so wickedly proud as to reject an offering of true love.
Mr. Parker insisted upon purchasing the dress—a duplicate of Cynthia’s. It was fine handkerchief linen, and Mrs. Brown, who made all Doris’ clothes, would make it up simply and beautifully, while Doris devoted all her spare minutes for weeks to certain individual touches of hand embroidery. Cynthia recklessly squandered a whole month’s pocket-money on the long, white suede gloves, and Grandma Brown unearthed from among her girlhood’s treasures a sandal-wood fan of delicious memory.
Doctor Brown brought home one day a small watch cased in gun-metal with Stella’s name on it, and Miss Morrison, who had gone back to the city to teach, sent a long, curiously wrought gun-metal chain.
But the most surprising contributions came from Uncle Si Wolcott and Miss Sophia. Uncle Si actually “hitched up” and drove to Westwood for the finest pair of bronze slippers and bronze silk stockings to be bought with money. Miss Sophia had tatted a handkerchief, but being impressed at the last minute with the apparent meanness of her offering as compared with the others, she unlocked a certain bureau drawer and took from it a quaint comb of carved ivory, fetched home from China by a seafaring ancestor, which gave the crowning touch to Stella’s strange beauty, set in the swirling masses of her blue-black hair.
The girl laughed and cried when she saw them, forgetting for once all her Indian stoicism, and stroked the lovely frock with reverent fingers, saying softly:
“Do you know, dears, I can love these clothes!”
There was one more gift, that came by mail on the very day of fate itself. It was a box just long enough to hold the diploma, the sandal-wood fan, the ivory comb, and any treasures worthy a place with these. It was cunningly made by hand out of fragrant, warm-hearted cedar-wood, fitted with a tiny lock and key, and decorated with a knife in conventionalized designs, chief of which was the recurring device of a five-pointed star. Doris and Cynthia were the only ones privileged to admire Ethan’s gift.
Next to the bride in the affections of rural New England stands the fair girl graduate, and that June day in Laurel was apparently quite given over to the triumphant parade of simple-hearted youth. In many a modest home, solicitous mothers were robing and adorning their daughters as if for the altar itself, and that evening in the town hall it seemed as if every soul in the village, old and young, rich and poor, must be pressing into a seat or peering curiously in at open door or window.
And now the orchestra struck up and the platform began to fill—that platform fluttering with banners and banked with the dark-green, glossy leaves and rosy chalices of the mountain laurel that gave the village its name. Pete Holley, a strapping youth of color, and star of the football team, took his place with dignity. Mary Maloney, the washer-woman’s daughter, more elaborately dressed than most, sat happily in the front row next to demure Doris, whose piano solo made a pleasing variation in the programme.
Stella, too, had a “part”—she and Rosey Bernstein led their class; and those who saw her on that day of days will long remember the tall, swaying figure, the gliding step, the vivid, dark face with its touch of foreign distinction among the rosy village girls, and most of all the tender, rhythmic tones that rang so true in her touching farewell to school days and to the comrades of that golden time.
For Yellow Star had made her difficult decision—to go back to her own people and do for them what she could. There had come, in the early spring, a cry for help—another dingy scrawl in scarce legible Dakota from the Indian camp on Cherry Creek. Blue Earth had a “bad heart;” her husband, Young Eagle, had left her and gone across the Big Water with the show; she had a baby girl now, and the boy was five years old. She wanted them to “walk the white man’s road,” and she wanted The-One-who-was-left-Alive to come and live with her, and teach her how to teach her children. There were many women in the camp, she said, who needed such help.
After a sleepless night with the letter under her pillow, the girl had shown it to her friends and asked their advice. In her heart, she knew that there was only one answer possible, and they read her decision in her face. Of course, Doris and Cynthia cried a little, and squeezed her hands, and begged her “not to give up her plans, darling;” while Miss Sophia held her peace with remarkable consistency and success. But Doctor Brown promptly hunted up Mr. Parker, and the two had an important conference.
“I can see she means to go, and it may be the best thing to do, for a time, at any rate,” the Doctor admitted, gruffly. “But there’s just one thing about it; that girl is not going into an Indian camp without position or backing. She’s too handsome, for one thing; and too young and trusting altogether. Young as she is, Stella is competent to fill a good place in the Government Indian Service, and that she must have!”
“I’ve been telling my wife I’d like nothing better than to send the girl through college, if she wants to go,” demurred Mr. Parker. “I think she could persuade my girl to go with her—there or anywhere! Say, Doc! are you dead sure she ought to butt in amongst a lot of half-savage Sioux—a girl who would make a place for herself in any community?”
“I don’t know much about the American Indian, but judging from our Stella, there must be good stuff in the breed,” answered the Doctor, stanchly. “She’d make a magnificent nurse—doctor, perhaps; but she’s too young to begin training yet awhile. Better let her try it out west for a year or two; she will, anyway; she’s made up her mind, and you know what that means. What I came over to ask you is have you any wires to pull that’ll land our little girl in the Indian Service? What?”
“Sure,” assented Mr. Parker, heartily. “There’s Senator Morton; he’ll do anything for me—within reason, of course. We’ll fix it up in no time.”
When Stella herself was cautiously consulted, a fortnight later, she declared that she did not know enough to teach and would rather not take a school position. She wanted to live right in the camp, she said, close to the people; to help the poor, ignorant women and children, like Blue Earth and her babies.
“Then you want to be a field matron,” pronounced the Doctor, who had been studying the subject. “Six hundred a year and the right to draw on the agency for supplies—soap and buckets and rations for sick people and all that. The work just what you would be doing anyway, and the whole United States Government back of you. That’s the talk.”
And so it came about that our eighteen-year-old Indian girl delivered her valedictory with her appointment as field matron at Cherry Creek pinned inside her white frock, right over the loving heart that beat high with the hope of service.
Cherry Creek is one of those erratic streams that flow eastward into the brown Missouri across the billowing plains—now a mere wavy line of timber fringing a dry ravine; again an angry yellow flood that drowns box-elder and wild cherry and washes the feet of the slim young cottonwoods.
The sun-brimmed solitude of a September day enfolded the two girls, Blue Earth and Yellow Star—for, although mother of a five-year-old boy, the deserted wife of Young Eagle was in reality not so much older than her friend—as they happily gathered red-and-yellow Dakota plums in the rustling thickets away up the creek. The young mother was quaintly robed in a loose, wide-sleeved “Dakota gown” of Turkey red calico, while the young maid was more trimly clad in one of the plain, indigo-blue prints that she had last worn in Mrs. Sophia’s kitchen. Only the freedom of the new life was symbolized and expressed by sleeves rolled over the dimpled, brown elbows, uncovered, glossy head, and soft, richly embroidered moccasins on the slender feet.
The honey-sweet plums, a peck or more, had been harvested in a wide-mouthed cotton sack. “Let me carry it—you have the baby!” cried Yellow Star, gayly tossing the sack over one shoulder, while the other picked up a placid bundle rolled in a patchwork quilt from under the wild plum tree, and with much maternal cooing and chattering proceeded to secure it on her back, in the folds of the bright shawl she wore.
“Chas-kay! Chas-ka-a-ay! Where is the little rascal?” she scolded, good-humoredly; and Yellow Star took up the musical call and sent it ringing through the ravines. In a minute or so, there came obediently stumbling up the slippery bank a queer little nondescript figure, attired in nothing but a green calico shirt and a pair of tiny moccasins, its two tight braids of black hair tied up with red flannel, and the round face of a shining cinnamon brown set with two black gems, in the shape of a pair of sparkling, mischievous eyes.
“I was only digging medicine,” the elf soberly announced; “good medicine for The-One-who-was-left-Alive!” He held up a long, straggling root, and looked so irresistibly important that both girls burst into peals of tuneful laughter.
“I was only digging medicine,” the elf soberly announced. Page 209.
“We’ll take it to show Grandmother,” declared the one so favored, whose botanical studies had already suggested to her to penetrate, if possible, the mysteries of the Dakota herbalist. She seized his little, earth-stained hand and all three set out for the camp—a huddle of log cabins, looking for all the world like the “cob houses” of children, interspersed with an occasional brush arbor or rude corral, and with many of the white, conical teepees of the Sioux.
Glimpsed in the distance, under a sky quivering with heat and against a wide background of sunburnt grass, the whole looked more like a toy village than anything real and serious, at all events to the new-comer, who, with all her earnestness of purpose, had fallen to some degree under the spell of that colorful, elemental existence.
The zest of the open spaces and the free winds, the absence of clocks and bells and whistles and other insistent reminders and regulators of our time-slavery, the fascinating simplicity and friendliness of the dark-faced, smiling people—her people—in their easy, picturesque garb, all these had seemed so restful, so almost intoxicating, after the set tasks of many well-ordered years.
When they reached camp and threw down their burdens under the shade of a large arbor of boughs, where an old woman with gray witch-locks flying loose and a skin like dark-brown parchment looked up from her eternal moccasin-mending, and a long-haired dog not much bigger than a rat flew to greet them with all but articulate cries of joy—then, indeed, they were at home!
“Sh-h-h-Sheka!” Blue Earth was tired and hungry, and drove off the dog with a rush of angry sibilants.
“Here, Sheka, Sheka! Poor little thing,” coaxed Yellow Star, pitifully.
“How many did you get?” demanded Grandmother, reaching greedily for the sack. “The Blue-Coat has been here with a paper; I think it is from the Little Father. I gave him coffee and bread, and he told me all the news. Here is the paper,” and she drew it from her wide sleeve and held it toward the girl.
Yellow Star took the agent’s letter and glanced it over as she stood, while the others, Chaskay and Sheka included, gazed steadily into her thoughtful face with frank curiosity.
“It is only to say that the sewing-machines will not be here until next month. I sha’n’t wait for them; the women are coming to-morrow, and there’s plenty of hand sewing for the present,” and she entered the little house with quite a different air from that of the plum thicket.
Certainly the Indian agent, at his first interview some weeks earlier, had not to complain of any lack of dignity in the young field matron.
“You understand that suitable quarters will be provided for you, Miss—ah!—Miss Waring,” he had drawled, keeping his heavy-lidded eyes upon her face with a persistency that was not altogether pleasant.
(“First Indian girl I ever Miss’d,” he acknowledged later to his grinning cronies in the office, “and it came sort of hard. Nothing else for it, though. She’s considerable of a lady, she is!”
“Considerable to look at, too, I sh’d say,” Jack Pepper mumbled under his breath.)
“I expect to stay with my friend, Young Eagle’s wife, in her house on Cherry Creek,” Stella had replied, simply. “Her grandmother will live with us.”
“Hum-ha … Miss—ah!—Waring, if you have quite made up your mind to that, we shall have to make some improvements on the house. It’s an ordinary log cabin, isn’t it, Mr. Pepper? … one room? … Two? That’s good. Well, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We will build a frame addition 16 by 20 feet, for the field matron’s private apartment, with three windows and a good floor; lay floors in the other two rooms and put on a good, shingled roof. With these additions, I think you ought to be fairly comfortable.”
“Thank you, Major; that will be quite satisfactory,” Stella had answered, calmly.
“And about the furniture” (still keeping a furtive eye upon her face)—“Mr. Pepper, will you take this—ah!—this young lady to the warehouse and help her make out a list of her needs in that line? We supply only the necessaries, of course: iron beds with mattress and blankets, tables, kitchen chairs, stoves, dishes and so forth. If there is anything more that I can do for you, Miss Waring, I shall be happy to see you at any time.”
Possibly the “Little Father” would not have been quite so bland and accommodating if he had not had in his desk at that moment a letter from Washington, containing very plain instructions as to the conveniences to be supplied and the official courtesies to be extended to the newly appointed field matron, Miss Stella Waring. The good Doctor’s precautions were already justified.
The first meeting of the Cherry Creek sewing circle was a decided success—that is to say, the first ever held there under the civilizing auspices of a paternal Government, since from time immemorial the Sioux women have been accustomed to get together in the fashion common to all other women under the sun. For nobody knows how many hundreds of years they have plied their feminine implements—such as awl of bone and sinew of deer—and with dyed quills of the porcupine and hand-wrought of trader-bought beads, with skins tanned to a velvety softness or costly broadcloth of red and blue, have made and decorated their native finery with no mean skill, the while their tongues were busy with soft syllables of domestic chat and village gossip, after the universal feminine pattern.
The time was now ripe, it seemed, for some advance along these time-honored lines. Indeed, this small settlement on Cherry Creek is still among the most primitive on the whole Sioux reservation, having no day-school or settled mission of its own, and several of the women had expressed a wish to learn of their sophisticated sister the complicated art of the white woman’s dress-making.
So here they were, gathered under the picturesque brush arbor to the number of a score or more, the younger attired as gayly as tropical birds, the elder in sober plumage of dingy browns and grays, all with demurely drooping plaits of hair and shoulders modestly draped in the invariable shawl. Most were primly seated on common wooden chairs, while a few of the older and more conservative preferred a blanket on the hard-trodden earth floor.
Stella had a table full of work cut out and basted; puritanical checked gingham dresses and wide print aprons, together with boxes of thimbles and needles and thread; and the lesson proceeded, at first with some constraint, but soon with a loosening of tongues and a torrent of soft laughter and musical dialect.
Of course, all who had babies had brought them on their patient backs, and several youngsters of Chaskay’s age or younger were tumbling about the floor or running races over the sunshiny prairie. There were almost as many dogs as children, and a certain Miss Day, who had neither, appeared with the pretty, striped face of her pet ’coon peeping coquettishly over one shoulder.
Presently refreshments were served in orderly fashion by the two young hostesses—tea, boiled rice flavored with meat, the plums gathered the day before, and a quantity of small, flaky, biscuit baked that morning by Yellow Star.
“I should like to make biscuit like those,” Miss Day remarked, after an astonishing number had been consumed.
“Can you teach me to make the spongy bread of the white people?” asked another.
“My husband has often asked for the apple-pie he had at school,” chimed in a little bride.
“We will have a cooking-class,” laughed the young field matron, “and learn to make all these and many more. You must all keep chickens and milk a cow or two; then we can have ever so many good things—things fit to build strong bodies for your children.”
“If only the Little Father would not take them all away from us, as soon as they can walk, almost, to fill his school!” mourned an older woman.
“Did you know that the Little Father had given his permission for a dance to-night?” whispered a flighty girl to Blue Earth, whose face lighted up quickly at the news. Then she glanced half guiltily at her friend, justly fearing that the Indian dance might be under a ban. The comfortable house and abundance of food, to say nothing of sympathetic companionship, were too good to risk lightly.
“But you went to the white people’s dances when you were in the East,” she pleaded, after the others had gone, and the slow, teasing throbs of the dance-drum resounded through the village.
“That’s quite different,” Yellow Star explained. “We want our people to forget these exciting customs, and care for better things,” she reasoned, gently.
“But I’m not going to dance; I only want to look on a little while,” begged Blue Earth, as humbly as a child.
“All the white people do that; even the Little Father himself,” pronounced Grandmother.
“Then, will you promise to come home as soon as it is dark?”
“Oh, yes!” cried the other, eagerly.
But, like another Cinderella, she forgot, and lingered near an open window of the large, circular dance-house, her baby asleep on her back, gazing fascinated on the gorgeous, barbaric spectacle of painted, half-clad men executing their wonderful steps and poses, till aroused by a touch on her arm and a sweet, reproachful voice in her ear. And this is the true story of how the field matron chanced to be observed by old Standing Cloud and others, in the outer circle of the Grass Dance after dark of a balmy September evening, a fact which came duly to Jack Pepper’s ears and made her some little trouble, later on.
Laurel, April thirtieth.
Stella darling: If you only knew how we miss you here in Laurel! It seems like years since you went away; can it be it’s only nine months? And you don’t write half as often as you promised. I wonder what you are really and truly up to!
“Have you picked out your allotment yet? Be sure and get a good one. Oh, how I wish I were twenty-one this minute! Daddy perfectly understands that the very day I come of age I shall start on the long journey to Dakota, to join my dear friend Stella and stock that cattle ranch.
“Of course, you will want to hear all the news. Doris has been spending two weeks in Boston with her uncle—the rich one. What do you think? she went to the Symphony Orchestra twice, and to the opera once, and to two—no, three dances! She has the loveliest braided suit in a perfectly exquisite shade of blue; and a set of chinchilla furs for Christmas; and two new party dresses and a pale-blue evening cape lined with salmon that is simply a dream. I can’t tell you half. Doris is getting to be a regular society girl; and that, you know, Jibby, I never wanted to be and never will.
“Mother bought me a handsome suit, too—mine is the new copper shade—and a stylish hat; and Daddy would have taken me to New York on his last trip, but just then poor old Scotty had to break his leg, and of course I wouldn’t stir for worlds.
“Oh, I must tell you all about it! Just fancy! Ethan Honey happened to be in town over Easter, stopping with Uncle Si; and you know there isn’t any vet in Laurel; and so, I just ’phoned him—I was almost crazy, of course—and asked what should I do! He was perfectly splendid; got to the house in less than half an hour, and set the leg so that it’s practically as good as new! Wasn’t it clever of the dear boy? They say he’s thought everything of at the medical school, and bound to make a name for himself, some day.
“Speaking of Uncle Si, he hasn’t been quite as well as usual this winter; ‘kinder off the hooks,’ as he says. Mother Brown is trying to persuade him that he oughtn’t to live out there all alone any longer. Uncle Si says ‘it’s all-fired lonesome since the gals stopped comin’’ and if you ‘had a hankerin’ after missionary work, he could ’a’ showed you where you could put in your best licks, right here at hum.’ He means looking after him, of course; did you ever hear of anything so selfish? But old people are always selfish, I think.
“Grandma Brown says that a girl that’d disappint her own pa and hurt his feelin’s for the sake of a outlandish hound dog hadn’t ought to have a pa. You know she never liked me so very well, anyway. She’s always telling Doris how much better you used to do things. Doris says, if she didn’t love you dearly, she’d have been sick to death of hearing your name, long before this.
“You asked me in two or three of your letters about Miss Sophia. I don’t see why you care so much about Miss Sophia; she never did anything for you if she could possibly help it. She never liked me, either; I went to see her, entirely for your sake, dear, about a week ago. Seems to me she’s getting kind of old and feeble; and one funny thing, she didn’t scold a bit, not even when Scotty would squeeze past me and put his paw right up on her black cashmere lap. I don’t see how he ever dared. She asked me twice, when I heard from you last.
“Miss Morrison was in town the other day. She inquired after you the very first thing, of course. Miss Morrison thinks it was very fine and noble in you to go out to Cherry Creek.
“Why do you never say a word about the boys? Aren’t there any nice ones at all? Of course, you know how it is here; they’re all devoted to Doris! The next thing we’ll hear will be that she’s engaged! Jibby, darling, I’m just as sure as ever that I shall never, never want to get married. You will wait for me, won’t you? Wait till I’m twenty-one, I mean, and we can live together all the rest of our lives.
“Your own
“Cynthia.
“P. S. By the way, Ethan has grown ever so much handsomer since you saw him last. He looks years older and—and—oh, you know what I mean!
“C. P.
“N. B. Jibby, the minute you get this letter I want you to sit right down and tell me just what you are doing, and answer every single question, or I’ll never forgive you.
“Sin.”
“Cherry Creek, May the eighth.
“My dearest Cynthia: About half an hour ago, a girl you used to know was looking out of the window of her little prairie home. Such a funny little home, just one big room all shining yellow pine, with skins and rag rugs on the bare pine floor, a closet curtained off with dark blue calico, a black iron bed and a wash-stand and a trunk and some book-shelves built out of packing-boxes. Oh, and a lot of Indian bead-work on the walls, and a pine table covered with a Navaho blanket, and on it some old school-books and papers and pens and ink; and right over it a class picture in a frame—the class of 19—— at Laurel academy!
“The girl, as I said before, was looking out of the window; just watching the green creep over the prairie like an emerald fire kindled by the sun, and following the white road with her eyes as far as she could—the road that leads to the agency and the railroad and civilization.
“While she looked, a black speck appeared away out on that road. The speck grew bigger; soon it turned into a lumber wagon drawn by two shaggy ponies and driven by a tall, dark man in the navy-blue uniform of the Indian Police, with a shining shield on his breast that flashed in the sun.
“In a few minutes she heard the rattle of wheels, and then the camp dogs ran out to meet the good policeman with welcoming barks, and the girl left her window and went to the door that opened on the green prairie. For there are two doors in the yellow pine house; the other one leads right into a log kitchen where a tin coffee pot stood on the stove and an old woman squatted close by, tending a dear little baby, while the baby’s mother, in a red dress made like a kimono, was piecing a calico quilt.
“Well, the policeman pulled up his rough little ponies right in front of the door, threw down the lines and began handing out beef and flour and other things, which the woman in the red kimono carried into the house. Then, last of all, he put his hand in his breast pocket, took out two letters and gave them to the girl. After that, he saluted and drove away again.
“The girl sat down on the high door-sill and read her letters; one made her laugh out loud, to the great surprise of a very small dog who had curled up on a corner of her skirt. The letter was from her friend—her dearest, far-away friend in the New England hills. And now she is going to sit down at her table with the gay blanket cover, facing the class picture, and write her answer.
“I hope this doesn’t sound homesick, Cynthia and Doris—for this letter is to Doris, too—but you know how it is in the spring; how the people and the things that are far away seem to pull at your heart. If I were back there in Laurel, I should be dreaming of Dakota; and it is wonderful out here, girls! I wish you could see the great, furry anemones and the colt’s-foot and verbenas and all the other purple and gold-colored things that follow each other in a mad scamper over the wavy bluffs. And it seems as if I had never drawn a real, deep breath anywhere but here. It’s like the ocean wind without the salt in it.
“And I’m very fond of the people, though they are provoking, sometimes. They forget so—just like children. And Sir Walter mustn’t be jealous, but you ought to know my Sheka—that means ‘Poor Little Thing.’ He never leaves me if he can help it, and he’s just exactly like a real person.
“I don’t think I ever told you about the time we had getting our Chaskay into school. All the children have to go now as soon as they are five, and the mothers put off that fifth birthday just as long as they can; but Chaskay was five last summer, and in the fall the policeman came for him to go to the boarding school. Well, it was dreadful! Blue Earth wailed, and Grandmother sang the old Indian songs and shook her fist in the policeman’s face, and the poor little fellow was scared out of his wits and screamed till I was frightened, myself.
“Then I had an idea, and I said ‘Why not take him every day to the day school in Ring Thunder’s camp? He’s too little to leave his mother at night; why, he can’t even dress himself yet.’
“So it was settled, and we two take turns carrying him on horseback, five miles each way, morning and evening. Blue Earth rides her spotted pony, ‘Baby,’ and I my iron-gray pacer, ‘Old Soup,’ the people call him, because he goes from side to side, just like stirring something in a pot.
“It was glorious fun while the fine weather lasted. I don’t mind coyotes a bit, and I got used to the rattlesnakes after a while, remembering Ethan’s; but a five-mile ride in a Dakota blizzard isn’t any fun, especially with a child on the saddle in front of you, and you with your hands full to keep him from freezing. It’s better to just let the horse take his own course, anyway, when you can’t see the road a bit.
“But the worst was this spring, when the ice broke up on the White river. You see, the schoolhouse is on the other side of the river, and it was easy fording it in the fall, when the water is low, and easier still crossing on the ice; but one windy March day the ice broke up while we were on the further side.
“Good ‘Old Soup!’ He just gathered up his four feet into a bunch and jumped from cake to cake, floating and swirling around there in the black water, and once or twice he missed his footing and went in deep enough to wet my toes in the stirrups. I can tell you, girls, I was glad enough when he scrambled out on the other side. And wasn’t the boy brave? He never uttered a sound!
“There have been a great many sick people this spring—mostly with coughs and consumption. I take them beef-tea and milk gruel and rice and things, and it’s best to stay and see them eat it if you want to be sure. Especially if they’re women; they would so much rather give it to the men.
“One morning I was wakened out of a sound sleep by a tap on the window-pane. The sun was shining brightly, but I looked at my dear little watch that always hangs at the head of my bed, and it was only five o’clock. What do you suppose the woman said?—for it was a poor, old woman. ‘My son is dying, and begs for some light biscuit right away!’
“So I got up and built the kitchen fire before even Grandmother was stirring, and the poor sick man had his last wish, I guess, for he really did die. He was a young man who had been away to school.
“There are several returned students here who are thankful to come and look at my magazines and my photographs, and sing hymns, and get me to explain things to them. If I knew a little more, I would try to have an evening class. They always treat me with respect and call me ‘Older Sister.’ Why, the other day one of them even asked my advice about getting married! What do you say to that?
“There are two or three I don’t like at all—half-breeds and white men. One is an ‘assistant farmer;’ they are the men who are supposed to teach the Indians farming, but sometimes I think they don’t do much but run errands for the agent. This one’s name is Jack Pepper, and he visits this camp rather often. I don’t like his looks a bit, and I try to be out of the way when he comes.
“I make a great many calls, for I find the women like to have me come, and besides, it keeps them up to the mark in their housekeeping. Often the first thing I see, long before I get to the house, is a cloud of dust coming out of the front door. Then I know that some one has spied me coming, and is putting the one room in company trim. By the time I get there, it has not only been swept, but the beds neatly made, with fresh white pillow-cases, the dishes washed, the cupboard put in order, and perhaps, if I don’t hurry, the youngest child has its face scrubbed and a clean dress slipped on over the old one.
“Give my love to all—especially darling Doris and all her family. I often think of Grandma Brown. You’ll think it funny, I suppose, but Grandmother here reminds me of her a good deal. Not her looks, of course, for she isn’t neat and nice a bit; her fingers are like claws and her hair like gray feathers, almost; but they both have a way of speaking right out and saying things that bite.
“I shake hands with you in my heart, as our people say.
“Stella.
“P. S. If you happen to see Doctor Ethan again, please give him my kind regards.”
Of course, Stella couldn’t put everything into a letter, and one of the things she didn’t mention was a regular proposal of marriage from the old chief, Standing Cloud. She called him “old,” but he was really a rather fine-looking man of something over fifty. He had “thrown away” one wife in obedience to the law of the white man, and had then lost the other soon afterward, and he had missed no detail of the appearance of the young school girl on that fateful evening when she had gone after Blue Earth to the dance house. For the minute that she had stood there, framed in the open window, the light of the fire had struck full upon her winsome face and tall, supple figure, bringing out every line and feature with almost startling distinctness.
Standing Cloud was not a particularly progressive chief, but he knew a pretty girl when he saw her. This was a girl of his own people, after all, and an orphan at that; everybody knew her history, and such a man as he was not to be daunted by a few years of schooling. She had sense enough, probably, to appreciate the honor he intended to do her.
His offer came in round-about fashion, first through the grandmother, as was fitting, and finally through Blue Earth, who, with many giggles and much tossing of the head, managed at last to convey some inkling of it to the astonished and indignant girl.
“That old man!” she exclaimed, in disgust. “I don’t see how you can have the face to repeat such a thing. Why, how many wives has he had?”
“Only two; and he hasn’t any now; and he’s a chief, you know.”
“That’s quite enough. I don’t wish to hear another word about him as long as I live!”
And Grandmother was left to smooth over the affair as best she might, inventing all manner of humble excuses to cover the unheard-of rejection of a man of such importance.
Then there was Moses Blackstone, a serious young man who had passed some years in the mission boarding-school as its prize scholar, and was now a lay reader in the village, and a regular caller at the field matron’s home. In default of an evening school, she innocently encouraged him to sit by the hour at a corner of her table, poring over some old school-book, or stumbling over the long words in the illustrated magazines that came from her eastern friends. Occasionally he would even write letters on her stationery and frankly “borrow” her stamps; but Moses was really such a good young man, and so earnest and humble, that she lent him a helping hand whenever she could, with scarcely more self-consciousness than if he had been Chaskay’s age.
If he took unusual pains with his dress of late, the fact had escaped her, as also that he was not at all a bad speaker in his native Dakota. His English was inadequate, and she always made him talk to her in English, thus cruelly putting him at a disadvantage.
Therefore Stella was honestly shocked when one day Grandmother slyly pressed into her hand a little folded note, and upon carelessly opening it, she found a regular love-letter, signed “Moses.”
To tell the truth, it was very prettily and poetically expressed. “I am thinking of something,” it began in the native tongue. “I think of it night and day. It will not let me rest nor sleep. It is always of you that I think and of my longing to be near you, and my wish that we two might be one.”
Stella was really most unreasonable. Her cheeks glowed and her black eyes snapped. She tore the pleading little note into tiny bits, and strewed it on the floor before Grandmother’s astonished old eyes. That was her answer.
The missionary from the east who had stepped into Father Waring’s old shoes was far from finding them a fit. Though he had been there for several years, people still called him “the new minister,” a circumstance which tells its own story to the discerning. Certainly his manner was a trifle dry, even when his intentions were most kind.
It seemed to our heroine, who we know was sensitive to a fault, that everybody looked at her critically, even coldly, when she came to the agency church in her trim, tailor-made suit and tasteful little hat, and modestly took her seat among the shawled and hatless Indian women, or when, innocently conspicuous, she walked the one street on “Issue Day,” with business-like intentness upon her various errands.
She was fairly happy, upon the whole, among her own people at Cherry Creek, but with the “white people,” who should have welcomed her in all sincerity as a fellow-worker, she felt lonely and ill at ease. It was just as if the agent and his employees, the minister, and most of all their wives, were continually saying among themselves:
“How long do you suppose she’ll keep it up? Too well-dressed and too self-possessed for an Indian girl, anyway; looks as if she thought too much of herself—needs taking down a peg.”
This note of patronage and suspicion was so unlike the general attitude toward her in her New England home that Stella couldn’t help resenting it, and accordingly held her well-groomed head a trifle higher than before. There was only the little day-school teacher in Ring Thunder’s camp, Chaskay’s teacher—a simple, good-hearted girl, not much older or more experienced than Yellow Star herself—these two got on together from the first. Stella fell into the habit of going over there on “Old Soup” to spend her Sundays, since she had actually come to dread meeting any of the agency people, and after poor Moses’ unwelcome pretensions she no longer cared to attend the rather primitive but always reverent little service in his large log cabin.
Long before September came round again, Stella had learned that the annual church convocation would meet at “our agency” this year. This meant a great gathering of perhaps a thousand Indians who came from agencies hundreds of miles distant, traveling overland, for the most part, in picturesque canvas-topped wagons loaded with camp equipage, toward the appointed meeting-place. It was the event of the year to all good Christian Indians, bringing social as well as spiritual inspiration, comfort, and cheer.
Most of all, Stella looked forward to meeting the Bishop, whose face of lofty calm and sweetness, under its silvery crown of hair, floated high like a white cloud among dear memories of childhood days. In those days, he had been from time to time a guest under their roof, giving to the very food he shared a sacramental savor, and as a small, shrinking, black-eyed maid she had never lost the sense of a grave and gentle Presence in the little white guest-chamber they called the “Bishop’s Room.”
And now the simple, loving preparations were all complete. Not without self-sacrifice, a feast had been provided for the visitors, forage for the visitors’ horses, fresh vestments for the clergy, and candles for the plain little altar. Near the little Gothic church at the agency rose a wide circle of teepees, looking as if a flight of great, white birds had suddenly alighted upon the sunburned grass. Children ran joyously to and fro, men gathered in groups, matronly women bent over their camp-fires, and the soft music of their greetings was in the air.
Before the church bell should ring to summon the dark-skinned congregation to their first service under the open sky, the Bishop sat at meat in the modest rectory, reaping the year’s harvest of rewards and perplexities, and now and then dropping a quiet seed of counsel, or straightening a tangled skein of anxiety.
“And where is my little Stella?” he asked presently, with a smile. “I understand that she has come back to Cherry Creek as a field matron.”
“I have heard no complaints of her work, Bishop,” the missionary acknowledged, frowning slightly nevertheless. “I—a—I believe she is quite efficient; however, we do not see her at church as often as I could wish. Certainly I expected her to-day, but we have seen nothing of her.”
“The truth is,” his wife added, rather sharply, “it isn’t easy to get into touch with Stella Waring. She—well—she’s almost too much the lady for Cherry Creek. Too well-dressed, even; I fancy people think she puts on airs. That good Moses Blackstone was quite seriously interested at one time; I really think Stella treated him badly. Don’t you think, Bishop, it’s apt to spoil them a little—this going east for an education?”
“Spoil them? Why, yes, my dear lady; for hewers of wood and drawers of water no doubt it may spoil them. We must not expect them to slip back into quite the old place,” suggested the Bishop, mildly. “It may even be possible that she has outgrown our good Moses. Stella was always a dear child; let me see—it’s just six years since I confirmed her. I should like very much to see her again.”
The missionary parlor had quickly filled, meantime, with the Bishop’s friends and disciples of both races, among them Stella herself, her lithe, girlish figure half hidden behind a window curtain, her soft eyes fastened eagerly upon the closed door. At last a quick, decided step was heard, and the gracious form of the Bishop, as erect as of old but looking to the girl much frailer and older than she had remembered him, entered the crowded room. His keen, kind eyes, darting rapidly from one face to another, flashed instant recognition into her own, and almost before she knew it, Stella found herself standing before him, all a-tremble with timid happiness, and both slim, brown hands drawn into the Bishop’s strong clasp.
“Can this tall girl be my little Stella?” she heard him say, while over a face in repose a little sad and stern there broke that smile like winter sunshine—a spirit radiance that none who saw it can ever forget. The rest fell back instinctively, or else the Bishop drew her into a quiet corner, and for a minute they two were alone together.
“I hope I may hear that you are happy in your work for our poor people?” began the Bishop, very gently.
The quick tears shone in Stella’s expressive eyes.
“I’m sorry for them—I love them,” she murmured; “but oh, Bishop! I do so miss dear Mother and Father Waring!”
“I miss them, too,” the Bishop responded, with such delicate sympathy in his tones that she found the courage to go on.
“I miss my—my friends in Laurel, too, Bishop! I—I’m afraid I don’t know enough for the work either; and yet I do truly want to help.”
“Of course you do, my child,” responded the Bishop. “Why, the very name we gave you in baptism signifies a star—a light unto the Gentiles—a candle that shall be set upon a candle-stick to give light to all that are in the house. That is what we have always expected of you. And even the name the old women gave you when they saved you from the sad fate that overtook your father’s people—The-One-who-was-left-Alive! You must have been kept alive for some good purpose; always remember that, Stella. Have you ever thought that you might like to go back to the East for more training—perhaps for the training of a nurse?” he went on, the keen eyes searching her grave, downcast face.
Stella blushed more and more as it flashed upon her for the first time that the Bishop knew a good deal about the last six years of her life—had doubtless been in correspondence with Laurel friends.
“I—I think I would, Bishop; only not just yet. You see, I promised Blue Earth. And besides,” she went on, with desperate honesty, “the white people here seem to think I know too much already. They seem not to like me because I—I suppose I am different from the other Indian girls.”
A sudden sternness drove the smile from the Bishop’s face, and for a moment or two he was quite silent, while the sweet-toned bell in the church tower began its call to sunset prayer.
“We will talk of this again,” he said, very gently. “God bless you, my dear child!” And he was gone.
With blurred eyes and dizzy brain Stella blindly followed the throng of gayly dressed, yet most quiet and reverent worshipers, young men and maidens, old men and children, mothers with babes in arms, and took her place in the great circle upon the bare prairie sod. In the center of the ring the Bishop and his ministers, many of whom showed earnest dark faces above the snowy surplices, read the prayers of the church and gave utterance to the Christian hymns that rose in a great wave of devotion to the skies. The soft syllables of her native Dakota tongue seemed to fit the dear, familiar words, and no one who looked upon that scene could ever have guessed that only eighteen years before those tawny hills had been black with armed men, and that peaceful plain strewed with the tortured forms of the dead and dying.
That needless, unpremeditated, pitiful slaughter of helpless children and women, so recklessly thrust in the way of the all-conquering white man! Stella tried not to dwell upon it; but whenever she was deeply moved the prostrate figure of the nameless mother would appear before her eyes—an ample womanly form shrouded in a dark blanket, and always with the face hidden.
To-night the crowd and the music and the beauty of the sunset and the Bishop’s words together had so wrought upon her, that the mother who sheltered her from the bullets seemed very near, and, forgetting pride and resentment and a certain secret longing, Stella gave herself up wholly to the deep magic of the hour. In her soul there reverberated that phrase Father Waring had once repeated to them, as coming from the lips of one of his native helpers:
“Pray for my people when the sun goes down!”
“I don’t see how they can breathe, do you?” Stella prettily apologized to the agency doctor, her bright face a pleasant enough sight in his musty old office, its shelves filled with unwholesome drugs reaching from floor to ceiling. Still a “fresh-air” enthusiast, as in the old Laurel days, she had insisted upon holding long consultations with this official, until he had simply been obliged to rouse himself and forsake the old routine of doling out these same drugs to a long line of Indians,—so far, at least, as Cherry Creek was concerned. Curious, how that young woman would take a personal interest in every single case.
Accordingly, he had entrusted to her a shelf of simple remedies, and had fallen into the habit of sending her full written directions for the care of patients in her neighborhood, especially the children. After she had brought the village almost single-handed through an epidemic of measles, with not a single fatality, he did not withhold from her the praise she certainly deserved, for measles had been regarded as generally fatal among the camp children.
Not satisfied with her accomplishments as a nurse, the young field matron had ideas of her own, which, as confidence grew, she imparted to her ally the doctor, and through him they gradually sifted into the office, and sometimes even appeared on official estimates and requisitions. It was, in fact, at her suggestion that the assistant farmers throughout the reservation had been instructed to teach milking and feeding calves by hand, so that there might be milk for young children and motherless babies. An improved brand of vegetable seeds supplied in greater variety had likewise produced good results. Perhaps her best idea was that of building mud and stone chimneys on to the unventilated log cabins—a plan that might have saved many lives if there had been energy enough available to put it into effect. To be sure, there were plenty of tents for tuberculous patients, but to suggest moving from a house into a teepee would have been far too reactionary.
Within eighteen months, she had become quite the autocrat of her own little village—old Standing Cloud being merely the figure-head. She had drilled her small household with infinite patience—and not without a long siege with Grandmother—to such “civilized” habits as regular meal-times, sitting down at table, and a weekly wash-day. The children’s bath night was duly observed, even though the ceremony must take place in a wooden wash-tub beside the kitchen stove.
After all this, it really was hard that when their own darling baby—Little Girl, they called her—came down with acute bronchitis, Grandmother and even Blue Earth suddenly rebelled, and obstinately refused to have anything to do with the “white man’s way.” The little stove was kept constantly stuffed with wood, and the baby lay gasping on the bed, rolled in unsavory quilts, reeking with heat and untouched for days by a drop of water. To all Stella’s pleas for a warm bath, an open window, even in an adjoining room, she received the sullen reply:
“This is no time for fooling. It didn’t matter when Little Girl was well, but now she is very sick. If we are not careful she will die!”
It was the dead of winter, but nevertheless Stella rode the fifteen miles to the agency on her faithful pony, saw the doctor, and even persuaded him to ride back with her. Backed by his authority, she took bodily possession of the sick child, gave it an alcohol rub, air, and medicine, and watched through the long, silent night.
Next morning, Little Girl was plainly worse. Grandmother crawled out-of-doors and tied a rag of red calico to a pole—her pitiful, unspoken prayer to the Powers! Her hoarse voice could be heard in the pauses of the wind, chanting a weird and mournful song.
Stella inwardly trembled at the sound, and all the spirits of her ancestors seemed to upbraid her from the dull, resentful eyes of the tormented mother, who sat huddled on the bed like a crouching animal, staring at the intruder with a look that said plainly:
“You have an Indian skin, but a white heart. If my child dies, you will have killed her!”
The girl shut her eyes and her ears, and she, too, prayed.
But she didn’t forget when the time came to give the doctor’s medicine. Hours passed like a bad dream, until, as she bent over the loved little form, a moment was enough to note the easier breathing, the beads of sweat on the pinched baby face. And that terror had gone by.
It was now late August, and no rain had fallen on the reservation for many weeks. The waving sea of prairie grass, vivid in May as a green gem, was now of a rufous brown. Water-holes were sucked dry; the smaller creeks had quite forsaken their sandy beds, and many of the people had to drive their cattle and horses long miles to water, every morning and evening.
The “Little Father” sat humped up in his office chair, with his coat off, discontentedly signing a batch of official papers and heaping objurgations on the weather, when Blue-Coat unceremoniously made his way in at the wide-open door and thrust a letter under the agent’s nose. The letter was from Cherry Creek.