YELLOW STAR

“I seem to be just in time, again, Stella,” was all he said.

Frontispiece. [See page 265.]

YELLOW STAR

A STORY OF EAST AND WEST

BY
ELAINE GOODALE EASTMAN
Author of “Wigwam Evenings,” “Little Brother o’ Dreams,” Etc.

With Illustrations by
ANGEL DE CORA
AND
WILLIAM LONE STAR

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1911

Copyright, 1911,
By Little, Brown, and Company.

All rights reserved

Published, September, 1911

Electrotyped and Printed by
THE COLONIAL PRESS
C. H. Simonds & Co., Boston, U.S.A.

TO WINONA.
(MOUNT HOLYOKE, 1914.)

Dark eyes, that drew their mingled fires

From native kings, and Pilgrim sires,

And fused within one glowing breast

The ardors of the East and West,—

Child of the prairie’s generous sweep,

Your tryst with grave Minerva keep,

Yet first on Wisdom’s roll you’ll find

The sacred love of humankind!

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

YELLOW STAR

YELLOW STAR

CHAPTER I
LAUREL FOLKS

It was four o’clock of a hot September afternoon, and the buzz of twenty girls released from school filled the close room with a sibilant overflow, much like the gossip of bees in a blossoming elder-bush. The boys had already gone clattering down the stairs to the ball-field, and the little maids of the highest grammar grade demurely prepared to follow, sipping the sweets of freedom with more of leisurely enjoyment, in true feminine fashion.

A long, thin girl of thirteen or so, in a starched blue gingham frock nearly to her sharp knees, who looked somehow as if blown straight forward by a strong wind, and a plump bud of a fair-haired damsel in pink, stood close together in an eddy of the murmuring stream.

“I don’t think it’s fair, Doris; no, I don’t!” were the long girl’s first words earnestly spoken, as she tossed the lank locks back from her eager face with a characteristic gesture.

“Don’t think what’s fair?” queried Doris, serenely. “Oh, Sin, you’ve dropped your glasses!”

“Bother the glasses—you know what I mean. That wild Indian girl from the ‘land of the Ojibways,’ or wherever it is they say she’s coming to our school, and the girls will make her life one long misery, just because she wears a red blanket, prob’ly, and a feather or two in her straight, black hair—”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Sin Parker. She never wore a blanket in her life, so there!”

“Why—why—isn’t she a sure-’nough Indian, then, after all?” stammered romance-loving Cynthia, dropping the glasses again in her excitement. “And how do you happen to know so much about it, Doris Brown?”

“Well, I do know; mother was out calling yesterday afternoon, and she’s heard all about it. I expect she’s over at the Spellman house now. You see, it’s this way…” And the two girls, with arms about each other’s waists and absorbed faces, drifted through the big doors in their turn and followed a chattering, fluttering throng down the wide, elm-lined village street.

In the prim parlor of an old New England homestead, watched over by the ghostly crayon portraits of departed ancestors, the fate of the brown-skinned little stranger was equally the topic of discussion.

Mrs. Brown, a stout, motherly lady in a creaking black silk, had timed her call neatly for the second day after the arrival from the west of Miss Spellman’s widowed sister, whose husband had lived for twenty years as a missionary among the Indians, and her unusual charge.

“No, I was never in favor of bringing the child to Laurel. I strongly advised Lucy to place her at once in one of the excellent Government boarding-schools for Indian children. I understand that they are everything that could be desired for a girl in her position—clean and well-managed—the common branches thoroughly taught, together with housework and sewing.”

Miss Sophia spoke with her usual positiveness in that hard, clear-cut voice of hers, raising her white, aquiline profile a trifle against the shadowy background of her ancestral “best room.”

“Why, sister,” pleaded gentle Mrs. Waring, almost tearfully, “I could no more have left my little girl in one of those big, bare, whitewashed barracks … to eat coarse food off thick stoneware in a noisy dining-room … to sleep with fifty other girls in a dormitory where the beds almost touch … she’s not used to anything like that! I tell you, the child is as sensitive as you or I.”

“I must beg of you, Lucy, not to mention my name in any such connection,” interposed her sister. “It would certainly seem that a school expressly provided for just such girls as Yellow Star—or whatever her ridiculous name is—must be the proper place for her. However, you were determined to bring her home with you, and you have had your way. It remains to be seen what will come of it… Let me fill your glass, Emmeline.”

“No, thank you, Sophia,” murmured good Mrs. Brown, hastily finishing her iced tea, and setting the thin, frosted goblet with its bits of shaved lemon peel on the silver tray at her hostess’s elbow. Sophia certainly did have a positive gift for making folks uncomfortable. “I surely do hope,” she plucked up courage to add, “that Yellow Star will do well in Laurel, and be happy with us, now that she is here.”

“We call her Stella,” faltered Mrs. Waring. “It seemed wiser …” (here Miss Sophia indulged in what might in a less aristocratic dame have been plainly called a sniff) … “wiser not to retain anything that might tend to make her needlessly conspicuous—”

“Oh, I see! ‘Stella’—that’s very pretty. I understand you are sending her to grammar school?”

“Stella will enter the eighth grade to-morrow,” Mrs. Waring answered, drawing courage from the delicate sympathy conveyed in her old friend’s soft, purring tones. “She is nearly fourteen, and I want her to be thoroughly prepared for the academy next year.”

“Why, I’m surprised! How ever did you manage it, Lucy? That’s my Doris’s grade—and Doris was fourteen last month.”

“I have taught Stella myself up to now,” her adopted mother announced with modest pride, “and a quicker or more willing pupil I never met with anywhere. Yes, I’ve talked with the superintendent; he questioned her himself; and he says she could get into the academy this fall, he thinks, but advises a year in the grades to give her more confidence and lay a better foundation.”

“Foundation for what—can any one tell me that?” Miss Sophia had been silent an unusually long time, for her. “I’m afraid my sister hasn’t considered that to educate the child above her station in life and out of sympathy with her own people will only lead to her unhappiness in the end. If you would only take my advice, Lucy, before it’s too late, and train the child for a little maid—since you will have her with you—instead of spoiling her as you do…”

“Stella is my little girl, sister,” interrupted the gentle Lucy, with the unexpected daring of some timid animal brought to bay. “She shall share whatever I have, and for as long as I live. Please remember that she hasn’t a blood relation in the world, so far as she knows, and is perfectly free to live anywhere. I intend to give her a good education—just as good as she can take, or as I would have given my own daughter, if I had one—and the rest is in God’s hands—and her own!”

There was a minute’s tense silence. Then Miss Sophia ostentatiously began a conversation on quite another subject with her subdued caller, who wanted nothing so much just then as to catch a glimpse of the unconscious bone of contention, but simply dared not ask in so many words to see Yellow Star.

Lucy sat back in her chair with her thin hands squeezed tightly together, trying hard to recover her composure. It was quite true that Sophia had opposed from the first her purpose to adopt and educate the child, and had yielded ungraciously enough in the end, merely because she had exhausted her weapons. There were but the two sisters left, and the homestead belonged to them equally. Mr. Waring had died the year before, leaving only the few hundred dollars that represented a missionary’s scanty savings. It was entirely natural and right that his widow should come home to live, and quite impossible for her to leave behind the waif whom she had picked up in the Indian camp some eight or nine years earlier, and had taken fully into her heart and home. Her dear husband had loved and believed in the child, just as she did. Yes, Sophia was making it very hard for her, who shrank unspeakably from anything like a contest of wills; yet the purpose with which she had come back to the old home was unshaken.

As Lucy sat there, struggling with painful thoughts and oblivious to the murmur of civil conversation, her quick eye caught a flash of white—evidently a slip of folded paper that some one had slid in the crack of the closed door. She hastily left her chair, and with her sister’s cold gray eye upon her, secured the paper and slipped out of the room with it in her hand, for it was naturally impossible to open it under that fire of suspicious and almost hostile glances. The hall was empty, and she dropped down on a haircloth covered davenport and read:

“Mother Dear: I’ve done everything you said unpackt my things put them away ironed the napkins put on a clean frock for tea and set the table. I just have to go out in the orchard and think awhile. I wanted dreadfully to pick some flowers but Aunt said not to and I’m not going to. If you want me for anything you can find me in Apple-Tree Row next the Fence. I call it my House. Your Little Girl.”

This writing of unnecessary notes was a harmless fancy of Yellow Star’s, that her foster-mother had not had the heart to correct. She had had so few playmates on the reservation—for she wasn’t allowed to play with the camp children, and it had happened that but one of the agency people had a little girl of suitable age and irreproachable propriety—that she had been really obliged to invent most of her own amusements. And then, too, Lucy had told herself that “the child couldn’t have too much practice in English.”

But the “silly trick,” as Miss Sophia called it, had already been a source of some disquiet in the ill-assorted little household of three. Perhaps she had better give the child a hint. And Sophia had contemptuously repudiated the title of “Aunt,” so naturally bestowed on the only sister of the only mother that little Yellow Star had ever known. “None of that nonsense for me,” she had declared. “I haven’t adopted the child!”

“I suppose I’ll have to tell her not to say it any more … and she’ll think it so strange,” mused poor Lucy ruefully enough, foreseeing many trials for her darling, as she gathered up her nice black skirt and made her way as daintily as a cat along the box-bordered walk, past the grape arbor and the tidy kitchen garden into the grassy old apple orchard. She seldom went out-of-doors, except for church, or calling, or shopping, or on some entirely rational errand. It was perhaps the only trait of Stella’s that she vaguely disapproved—this craze to be off and into all sorts of outlandish places. Where under the canopy was she now? There was the last row of trees bending with red and yellow fruit, at the further end of the orchard, and no sign of her.

Everything was warm and sweet and very still. Only the invisible choir of crickets made silence musical, and a flaming torch of goldenrod beside the crumbling old stone wall seemed ready to light the summer’s funeral pyre. Not that Lucy Waring thought of it in just that way, but possibly Stella’s dreams and fancies might have been so translated.

Perhaps it had not been quite polite to leave the house so abruptly before their guest had taken her leave. She had forgotten … ought she to go back at once? But where could the child be? she wondered. As she stood hesitating, a low, sweet call made her look quickly up, and next instant a girlish figure swung down out of the old apple-tree and dropped lightly upon its feet.

A girlish figure swung down out of the old apple-tree and dropped lightly upon its feet. [Page 16.]

Hair of a dense blue-black was neatly braided and tied up with red ribbon that matched the red plaid in her irreproachable gingham frock; a faint sort of underglow warmed the smooth, brown skin; a something spirited about the carriage of the well-shaped head and a singular directness in the glance of the soft, black eyes were the first things you noticed. Surely, this was no ordinary child.

“Oh, mother, mother!” she cried, impulsively throwing her arms around the little lady’s neck. “Isn’t it beautiful? Oh, I wish we had real grass and apple-trees in Dakota, don’t you? It wasn’t wrong to come out here, was it? Don’t say it was wrong, mother! Can’t this be my House to come out to when Miss Sophia doesn’t want me? I feel as if she didn’t want me; her house seems to push me right out somehow. And I’m terribly afraid of going to school; I’ve been thinking how perhaps the other girls won’t want me either.”

“You must be brave, darling,” quavered poor Mrs. Waring. “Remember, this strangeness will all wear off very soon.”

“Oh, I shall be brave,” burst out Yellow Star, letting her slender arms fall at her sides, and holding her jet-crowned head higher than ever. “My people have always been brave, you know—so of course I have to be! And nobody at all will ever know how afraid I am … nobody but you, mother.

“That yellow-haired girl in the pink dress that just went up the straight path to the front door … there she comes down again with the stout lady with shiny black beads all over her bonnet and her tight, black waist—she looks just like some kind of large, shining beetle, doesn’t she?—well, my heart beats so it shakes me all over when I even think of going up and speaking to that girl in pink! I think she’s perfectly beautiful—and I’m terribly afraid of her—but she’ll never guess how I feel. There’s one thing I have to tell you, though,” she added in a more subdued voice. “I find I can’t call Miss Sophia ‘Aunt’ any more. Do you think you’ll mind very much, mother? I’m almost certain she can’t be any real relation.”

CHAPTER II
THE GIRL FROM DAKOTA

Lucy Waring had no warriors’ blood that she knew of to fall back upon, so perhaps it was partly her long association with the stoics of the plains that made it possible for her to turn over her little girl to the “new teacher,” the very next day, with the stiff smile of her New England forebears under social duress—to drag her eyes away from the wild, despairing courage of Yellow Star’s great black ones—to walk quite steadily out of the door and down the long flight of wooden steps and along the drowsy village street, without even a backward look to share or soften the imaginary terrors of School.

These took no worse form, just at first, than the curious but not unfriendly stares of forty-two pairs of critical young eyes, and the penetrating susurrus of forty-two edged voices, all of which the Indian girl felt with a pricking and tingling anguish in every fiber of her sensitive body, as she sat rigid in a front seat, directly facing the teacher’s desk.

Then the second bell rang, and there was a hush. As soon as she could, after opening exercises, Miss Morrison supplied the new pupil with pen and ink and the usual blank for the school record. It looked something like this:

• Your name in full.
• Date of birth. Year, month and day.
• Name of father.
• Father’s occupation.
• School previously attended.
• What grade were you in?

A wild glance down the length of the paper made it certain that her worst fears had been promptly realized, and poor Stella, after setting down her new name, Stella Waring, sat staring at the other five questions, fairly tense with nervous dread, until her busy teacher had found time to note the situation. Then she bent over the girl from Dakota and asked very kindly, in a low voice:

“Why don’t you put down your age and your father’s name, Stella?”

“I do not know my date of birth, year, month and day; I do not know my father’s name and occupation, and I never went to school before,” she replied in tones sharpened by fright, so that they rang through the crowded school-room, causing an audible gasp of astonishment.

“Why, I was certainly told that you belonged here,” wondered Miss Morrison; then, with ready tact divining something of the girl’s embarrassment:

“Never mind about the questions just now. This is our lesson for to-day; look it over, please, and be prepared to stand and read when I call upon you.”

This Stella could do, and knew she could. Abundant time was given to recover herself; then the paragraph assigned was read, if somewhat slowly and with the faintest trace of foreign accent, yet distinctly, and with more delicacy of modulation than perhaps any other in that room could command.

“Very good, indeed,” approved Miss Morrison; and this time the slight buzz sounded almost like encouragement, and the pricking and tingling were less agonizing than before.

When the others passed out at recess, Stella remained in her seat at a sign from the teacher, who sat down beside her and bent her violet-scented brown head sympathetically toward her singular but far from unattractive new pupil.

“About the age, dear,” she began, tentatively, “surely you must know…”

“I am supposed to be thirteen years old, Miss Morrison, but I have not any birthday. Mother—I mean Mrs. Waring—always makes me a birthday cake on the nineteenth of February, because she says it is so sort of lonesome not to have a birthday. But I do not know really, so of course I could not put it down on the paper. You see, I … I was found! I never heard my father’s name or my mother’s name either—nobody knows who they were.”

Here the clear voice got somehow muffled, and the warm-hearted teacher hastily assured her that it didn’t matter one bit about the questions—she had had no idea—and impulsively she took the hated paper out of the little girl’s sensitive brown hand.

It might have been as well if Lucy Waring had explained matters somewhat before her abrupt departure; but the truth was that she had strung her difficult courage to the necessary point of leaving the child to her own resources in this strange, and possibly unfriendly, new environment. The effort had carried her to a really unnecessary extreme; she had forgotten that Yellow Star’s personal history was as yet quite unknown in Laurel.

Miss Morrison felt the incident to be a touching one. She even reproached herself for thoughtless adherence to routine, and during the rest of the morning gave a quite unusual degree of attention to her new charge. It appeared that Stella had the correct eye and delicate hand of her race; she was an excellent penman; she had been well drilled in the essentials. More: she was eager, alert, intense—quick to spring upon an idea as a cat upon its prey.

Most of the children went home at noon, and no sooner was school dismissed than Cynthia Parker, whose near-sighted brown eyes had been turned anxiously, half maternally toward the stranger, at the cost of frequent, though not unusual, blunders in her own recitations, darted to her side and began to speak rapidly.

“I know who you are; Doris Brown told me; she’s that yellow-haired girl in pink—see! she’s looking this way. My name’s Cynthia Parker and I hope we’ll be friends—I read everything I can get hold of about Indians—mother says I’m just like one. Do you like dogs?” And almost before Stella could find breath to reply, in her pretty, precise English, that she did, Sin had taken up the tale.

“I’ve got two—that’s the big one waiting for me outside—his name’s Sir Walter Scott, but we call him Scotty for short. Here, Scotty, old fellow!” And as the gaunt hound rushed upon them both, nearly knocking them down in his eagerness, she threw her arms around his homely neck and hugged him with an unaffected ardor that quite warmed the new girl’s heart.

“Let’s walk slowly and get behind; can we?” she whispered, shyly. “They do look at us so!” In fact, there was unwonted lingering that day, and much open whispering, which the three pretended to ignore. Doris had waited, as usual, and joined them at the door.

“Of course we can; nobody has dinner till half past twelve, and it’s only five minutes’ walk to your house,” she assented, pleasantly, while Cynthia bluntly remarked:

“They’re awfully disappointed, you know, because you didn’t wear your Indian suit to-day—a blanket and feathers in your hair. Why, you look almost exactly like anybody else, in that nice, brown linen.”

“Indian girls don’t wear feathers; only the men do that,” smiled the new girl, who much preferred to “look like anybody else,” and found personalities a bit embarrassing. Still, she was feeling a good deal better in the company of her new-found friends.

“Then do they all wear pretty blouses and stylish hats?” Sin unblushingly inquired.

“Well, there aren’t many of the old-style dresses left among the Sioux—my people. Why, a blanket robe trimmed with real elks’ teeth, or one of beaded doeskin, is worth a hundred dollars! Besides, nearly all the girls go to school nowadays, and wear dresses and hats like mine,—only not quite so pretty, perhaps, because my dear mother made these and she has such good taste,” ended Stella, loyally and lovingly.

“Mrs. Waring is perfectly lovely, I think,” began Doris, tactfully, but suddenly broke off with a little cry of dismay.

“Oh, Sin! whose dog is that? Hadn’t you better get the chain on Scotty?”

Alas, the warning came too late! The strange dog had already offered some nameless canine impertinence to Sir Walter, whose temper was none of the most patient. Instantly he hurled himself upon the new-comer, and the fight was on.

The three girls had purposely loitered, and the quiet street was almost deserted. It was the universal dinner hour, and boys and girls were rapidly disappearing down various side streets, urged homewards by the double spur of sharp young appetites and savory odors of “mother’s cooking.”

“Help! help!” screamed Sin, and forthwith flung herself with more valor than discretion upon the wallowing mass in the middle of the dusty road.

Doris grew very white, as she set her back to the hedge, drew her spotless skirts tightly around her, and earnestly begged her friend to “be careful!” But heedless, brave, loving Sin, crying loudly now and terribly alarmed for Scotty’s safety, persisted in wild and none too prudent attempts to drag him bodily forth from the fray. The strange dog had fastened viciously upon his throat, and the fight began to look serious. Why didn’t some one come?

In that very minute some one did, and the “some one” was no other than the girl from Dakota. She had broken a stout switch from an apple-tree that overhung the sidewalk near at hand, and was belaboring the strange dog in a steady, business-like fashion, at the same time calling him off in ringing tones, and in a language that he evidently understood, if her astonished classmates did not.

“Kigelá! kigelá!” they thought they heard her say, over and over; and whether the strange words composed a sort of charm or secret incantation for dogs, or whether it was some compelling power in the personality of the black-haired girl, or merely the flail-like regularity of her vigorous blows, it is certain at any rate that he soon let go his hold, and ran yelping away.

Sir Walter, gallantly scrambling to his long legs and shaking his bleeding but still warlike head, would gladly have followed, but was forcibly restrained by his disheveled mistress, who had contrived at last to snap the chain upon his collar, and while breathlessly dragging him homewards, did not forget to call back over her shoulder in broken phrases her admiring gratitude to Yellow Star.

CHAPTER III
A LESSON IN HISTORY

The square north parlor of the century-old Spellman homestead was furnished with few concessions to modern taste. In summer it was carefully darkened, and during the colder months exhaled that penetrating chill that is still more or less characteristic of the traditional “best room” in rural New England. There was also a mingled odor of sanctity and dried rose-leaves that filled the soul of the young exile with a secret awe. She understood perfectly that children were not expected to enter that room uninvited; even the family reserved it for occasions of ceremony; and it was with a thrill of conscious guilt overborne by an irresistible attraction, that she had stolen in alone on this keen October morning before Miss Sophia was up, and while her sister was capably engaged in preparing breakfast in the large, cheery kitchen.

It was not the ornaments, wonderful as they were, upon the high mantel-piece—the pallid wax flowers under glass, the waving pampas plumes and pink-lined tropic shells dear to romance—no, not even the mysterious closed piano—it was those ghostly crayon portraits in their tarnished gilt frames that drew this little unrelated fragment of humanity with a fascination that she did not in the least understand. She only knew that to gaze upon their white, shrouded faces was to yearn for even the staring, pictured counterparts, even the chill, clustered gravestones of her own vanished forebears. Vanished, indeed, since not even a name or a memory remained to their wistful and solitary descendant!

And these Spellmans and Russells—these revered ancestors of her dear “Mother” Waring as of the thorny and unapproachable Miss Sophia—their by-gone greatness had been so impressed upon her by allusion and suggestion that in the secret world of her imagination it reached heroic proportions. So this child of two races, the one by birth, the other by associations quite as real and vital, well-nigh forgot the shadowy demi-gods of her people while she bowed at the shrine of the commonplace county Judge who was the greatest of all the Russells, and fancied a beauty as of the moon and stars in the conventional portraits of his wife and daughters, with their uncovered necks and pallid, simpering faces.

Only a few stolen moments of gazing, and Stella crossed the dark hall on noiseless feet—for even in the black-leather boxes of civilization she had contrived to keep her native lightness of step—and softly opened the dining-room door.

With its cheerful morning sunshine streaming over the chromoed walls and gayly-carpeted floor, and with the canary singing his prettiest in the south window, above the row of thrifty geraniums and begonias, this room was the strongest possible contrast to the gloomy one she had just left behind. Ah! and that very minute the wonderful bird came out of the clock on the mantel-piece and seven times called “Cuckoo!” while, as if in answer to the call, the door into the kitchen opened, letting in the heartsome odor of frying ham and eggs, and Mother Waring with the smoking coffee-pot.

Stella flew to bring the dish of oatmeal and the hot plates, and then busied herself with the neat tray that was regularly carried up to Miss Sophia’s chamber with her morning coffee and toast. To be sure, the elder sister was only five years older than Lucy, who owned to fifty-two, and who, folks said, had always been “kinder pindlin’,” and in truth was now much worn with hard work and recent grief. But we know that there are always people who contrive to be waited upon, and others to whom it naturally falls to do the waiting.

Housewifely traditions were closely adhered to in Laurel, where but few even of the “first families” kept a maid, and it was now Stella’s duty, together with dishwashing and dusting and such of the lighter household tasks as Lucy would allow her to undertake, to carry up Miss Sophia’s tray. Even that lady had grudgingly conceded that “the child wasn’t as clumsy and heavy-footed as you might expect,” though why you shouldn’t expect anything of the sort it would have taken a better ethnologist than Miss Sophia to explain.

The little ceremony ended, and the hard old eyes met with a low-voiced “Good morning,” and a rather frightened smile, the two ate their own substantial breakfast with a hearty appetite, and directly afterward “flew ’round” to get dishes and other “chores” out of the way before school-time. At a quarter to nine, Stella put on her neat jacket and knitted red tam-o’-shanter, hugged her kind foster-mother, and set out with cheerfulness upon her morning pilgrimage, glancing about shyly at the first corner for a possible glimpse of demure Doris tripping along the sidewalk, or scatter-brained Cynthia flying breathlessly down the hill.

Laurel, like many another village of its ilk, was an odd mixture of modern democratic conditions with the elder social inheritance. In the village school, the children of European peasants, the earlier and quick-witted Irish, the later Poles, with their broad, heavy faces, two or three brilliant, undersized young Jews, and the dark-brown scions of several long-established negro families, sat side by side with the severely self-respecting descendants of the earliest Puritan stock. The six and seven-year-olds knew no difference, and flocked indiscriminately together at recess, but it must be admitted that the caste idea grew with their growth, and that in grammar-school and academy circles the lines were drawn more definitely than in many larger places, to the end of needless resentments and heartaches.

Yellow Star added one more ingredient to the racial melting-pot. But whether because of a certain aboriginal dignity, or the name and protection of a family as much respected as any in Laurel, at any rate nearly everybody found it possible to accept her with excellent grace, and it might have been something personal to herself that bid fair to complete her conquest of the village. Two of the very “nicest” girls in Laurel, Cynthia, whose father was supposed to be the “best fixed” merchant in town, and Doris, the busy Doctor’s only child, were already her devoted friends.

Notwithstanding the fact that she had promptly taken her place among the best scholars in the room, the girl from Dakota had not yet lost her sense of audacity in rising to recite before so imposing a company.

“Why, Stella! you don’t have to dig at your books the way you do; it’s absurd! Look at me; I haven’t opened a single one since Friday afternoon, and I get along,” argued happy-go-lucky Sin.

“But you belong here, and you have been to school always. It is different with me. This is my one chance of really belonging.” And, contrary to all advice and precedent, Stella persisted in regarding school as a privilege to be lived up to, and failure in recitation as deep disgrace.

The first thing after recess was American History review.

“How did the early settlers treat the Indians? Mary Maloney,” began Miss Morrison.

“They treated them fine,” declared the auburn-haired Mary, with a sly glance over her shoulder at the unreasonably popular new arrival.

“What did the Indians do? Rosey Bernstein.”

“The cruel and treacherous savages turned upon the defenseless settlers with fire an’ ax,” Rosey glibly recited. “They now began a series of frightful massacres.”

“They stove the babies’ heads in, right in front of their mothers’ faces, and then made the mothers walk hundreds of miles barefoot in the deep snow,” eagerly amended woolly-headed Pete Holley, and all the boys wagged their heads and grinned with satisfaction.

“After they had scalped all the fathers by the light o’ their burnin’ buildings,” finished Rosey complacently.

Several hands went up, but Yellow Star in her excitement quite forgot to wait for the teacher’s permission.

“Who says that the settlers were kind to the Indians?” rang out in challenging tones.

More hands madly clawed the air, and Miss Morrison rather unwillingly nodded to Rosey, who read from her open book:

“‘They treated the Indians for the most part with justice and kindness, notwithstanding which the cruel—’”

“That will do for the present, Rosey,” interrupted her teacher, and was hastily casting about in her own mind for a basis of compromise between warring factions when a certain black-eyed little heroine rose precipitately to her feet, and delivered her soul without fear or favor.

“Was it treating them with justice and kindness to take their lands away from them, and give them only a few beads and knives for thousands of acres? Was it fair to give them whiskey to drink, and knives to kill people with, and then when they were drunk and angry and killed some bad white men, to punish the whole tribe by burning their villages and wives and children?” demanded her people’s advocate.

“Did the ‘cruel, treacherous savages’ take away all the white people’s guns and then shoot them down, women with little babies and boys and girls smaller than us? Did they chase them all over the prairie and kill them while they begged for mercy, and then call it a battle? That’s what your soldiers did to us, and I was in it! Maybe, if we wrote the history books, there wouldn’t be so much in them about the ‘treacherous Indians!’”

Breathless and darkly flushed, the girl from Dakota sank into her seat, and there was an awful hush.

Cynthia was staring at her friend with open-mouthed admiration, and tender-hearted Doris had her face hidden on her desk, while most of the children, horror-struck, yet thoroughly enjoying the situation, looked hopefully to “Teacher” for summary vengeance on the daring rebel against constituted authority.

That personage, however, gazed straight before her with expressionless face, until the silence had grown positively fearsome in its explosive quality. Then she simply remarked:

“Close your books, children! Our lesson in history is over for to-day.”

“Apple-Tree House, Monday.

“Dear Mother-of-Mine, I love Miss Morrison she never said a word though I was bad to-day and talked right out in school. The book was wrong and I was right but that didn’t make it proper for me to talk did it? But Miss Morrison is a Angel and Doris Brown cried because she was sorry for the poor Indians. I love her too. How many kind people there are in the world! I am so happy I almost feel as if I could love Miss Sophia but not quite. Your Little Girl.”

CHAPTER IV
THE-ONE-WHO-WAS-LEFT-ALIVE

The traditional Thanksgiving dinner was a ceremony never omitted at the Spellman homestead, even though there had been years when Miss Sophia had eaten it quite alone, with a determination rather grim than grateful. This year, there were the two elderly sisters, alone in their generation, yet with little in common save their family history and childhood memories, and the little maid from sun-steeped plains of far-off Dakota who sat sedately between them, plying her knife and fork with a decorum that even Miss Sophia could not gainsay. Now and again her black eyes darted keenly from one subdued face to the other, as if in search of something; a “trick,” Miss Sophia said, that made her “as nervous as a witch!”

The long, heavy, and, to tell the truth, rather silent and oppressive meal had come to an end at last, with pumpkin pie and Indian pudding made punctiliously after the old family recipes, and a mold of “quaking jelly,” that had been a favorite of Lucy’s from childhood. After the black coffee was brought in, Stella slid her nuts and raisins into her pocket, and rose at a nod from her foster-mother.

“Mrs. Maloney will wash the dishes to-day, dear,” she said. “You may go out now, or do anything you like for the rest of the day. And I think I hear Cynthia’s whistle,” she added, indulgently.

Miss Sophia sighed aggressively. That clear, boyish whistle was a fresh offense in her ears.

“Go out by the side door, Stella; and, whatever you do, don’t let in that dog with his great, muddy feet!” she commanded; sure that, if Cynthia were coming, Scotty could not be far off.

“Come on down to Doris’ house,” burst out Sin, before the door was fairly open. “It’s always lots of fun down there; her mother lets us crack nuts and pop corn and everything. Mother has a headache again and I mustn’t make any noise around home, and of course it’s solemn as a church here—’t always is. Can’t you come, Jibby?” she begged, anxiously.

(The new name was short for “Ojibway,” invented to tease the little Sioux girl, but Yellow Star accepted it, as she did most things, with quite stoical composure.)

“Yes, I can, Sin; I can do anything I want all the rest of to-day,” she answered, gravely. “But oh! do let’s go to the woods!”

“All right; put on your things quick, and come along! (Down, Scotty! down, sir!) We must stop for Doris, though; and I think Miss Morrison’s there to dinner to-day.”

Stella’s night-black eyes glowed at this, for she silently worshiped her sympathetic teacher.

Arrived at the Doctor’s, they found a large and merry party gathered around the air-tight stove in the shabby parlor, listening with enthusiasm to the warbling of operatic stars on the new phonograph, followed by a “piece” on the piano by demure Doris. There were Grandpa and Grandma Brown, a brisk and well-preserved old couple, with cheeks like rosy winter apples; Uncle Si Wolcott, Mrs. Brown’s eccentric bachelor brother, who lived all alone in a white farmhouse on the “Bay road,” Doris and her father and mother, and, finally, two guests who were not “kin” to any one else present.

One was Miss Morrison, whose home was in an up-to-date little city in a neighboring State, and who must otherwise have eaten her Thanksgiving dinner rather forlornly in a boarding-house; the other, a lanky boy of sixteen or so, who wore glasses and a thoughtful air, had created some amusement for the giggling girls at the academy by his name, which was Honey. When thus appealed to in the velvet tones of some “lady teacher,” the girls seemed to think it funny. His “front name” was Ethan, and he was an orphan with his own way to make, his nearest relative a none too loving “aunt by marriage,” which explains his appearance on the day of family reunions at Mother Brown’s hospitable table.

The present was not, as Grandpa Brown had more than once remarked with apparently a distinct sense of personal injury, a “genoowine old-fashioned Thanksgivin’.” Far from affording the excellent sleighing which had been expected to facilitate family gatherings in Grandpa’s day, and the coasting that had undoubtedly sharpened the youngsters’ appetites for “turkey an’ fixin’s,” an unseasonable Indian summer warmth pervaded this particular twenty-seventh of November. When the young people set out on their walk, Ethan Honey and Miss Morrison being included, they found the country roads soft underfoot, rusty green leaves yet clinging to the wide-spreading apple boughs, with here and there a frost-bitten apple, and even the yellow of ripe corn still nestling in some of the brown stooks that dotted the fields like tattered and smoke-stained wigwams. Red alder berries and gray clematis fringes and the “ghosts of the goldenrod” adorned the wayside, while the purple-brown woodlands melted into a nameless haze upon the lonely horizon line.

“I’m fond of cross-country hikes, aren’t you?” Ethan observed, as he turned to offer Stella an informal lift over the low stone wall that lay between them and a short cut to “Wolcott’s Woods.”

“I do not know that word ‘hikes,’” she answered, in her slow, careful English, “but if it is anything like to-day, I am sure I shall like it very much. I never really knew about Thanksgiving before.”

“Oh, didn’t you?” asked the boy, trying not to stare at his self-possessed little companion, whose cadenced voice and quaint ways, as well as her unusual appearance, might have given him some excuse. “I suppose of course your people don’t keep Thanksgiving,” he added, awkwardly.

“Father and Mother Waring always had the good dinner and the church service,” Stella answered, “but somehow I never understood about the family part. I suppose because I was only a little girl then; or else because they don’t have families out in Dakota! I mean, there are so many lonely ones whose families are back east, with the old houses and the old names and all the old things,” the girl persisted, greatly to Ethan’s secret amusement at her unexpected point of view.

“But, Stella—that is your name, isn’t it?” he began.

“It is one of my names,” she replied with dignity. But just then Scotty dashed between them, nearly upsetting both, while Sin followed with scarcely less of abandon, shrieking “A woodchuck! A woodchuck!” at the top of her voice.

“I wouldn’t go any nearer if I were you, Cynthia,” advised Ethan gravely, while Doris and her teacher, calling out futile appeals to “be careful,” lagged breathless in the rear.

“It’s nothing but a horrid old skunk,” Cynthia presently complained, coming back quite crestfallen. “Will you never learn anything, you old dunderhead?” This to the sheepish Sir Walter, whom she had by his collar and the hair of his head.

“When you’ve skinned as many as I have, you won’t be liable to make any mistake,” the boy observed; whereat Doris shuddered visibly.

“You know,” she informed the others, “Ethan skins everything he can get hold of—and cuts them up, too, as often as not—cats and dogs and rabbits and frogs—ugh! He calls it ‘studying biology,’—isn’t it perfectly dreadful?”

“Ethan will probably be a great scientist, some day,” suggested Miss Morrison.

“He’s going to be a doctor, he says,” Cynthia bluntly objected, causing the boy to blush uncomfortably, while Stella regarded him with new respect.

To change the subject, he said something about prairie-dogs, and the girl from Dakota was called upon for an offhand description of these interesting animals, which she gave soberly enough, though making the others laugh with her quaint characterizations and clever mimicry.

Having crossed several fields and followed a farm lane to its end, Ethan let down a “pair o’ bars,” and the company climbed a rocky pasture knoll, where Yellow Star’s quick eye caught something gleaming like dull fire among the dead brown of the bare bushes.

“What is that? It is like a sunset!” she exclaimed, and Cynthia echoed her.

“Oh, what is it? Oh, how beautiful!”

“Bitter-sweet, and the finest I ever saw!” declared Miss Morrison, with enthusiasm. “Oh, oh! was there ever such a mass of it before? Have you a knife about you, Ethan? I simply must have some for my school-room; it will make a dream of a decoration, and last all winter.”

Cynthia and Doris ran about and exclaimed and unwound the most splendid branches, but the Indian girl stood quite still and let the beauty of it all sink deep into her heart. Years later, the sight of a red-gold spray, or even the very name of “bitter-sweet,” brought up that riot of color on the rocky knoll, and the wordless sadness of those veiled and lonely hills.

“Now, girls, we simply must get on, or it will be dark before we can walk to Wolcott’s Woods and back again,” declared Ethan resolutely, shutting his knife with a snap. The whole party followed his lead past a fringe of hemlock, maple, hornbeam and white birch, on to a wild and deep glen that suddenly opened at their very feet, with a foaming brook in its heart. Scrambling down the steep sides of the miniature canyon, they followed the stream to its outlet in a tiny pond, which is flanked on one side by the finest grove of pine in Laurel township.

“This is Uncle Si’s ice-pond,” announced Doris, proudly, “and these are Wolcott’s Woods!”

It was so mild that Ethan insisted upon taking off his coat, cushioning a giant log where the girls might sit and rest after their three-mile tramp, while the sun already glowed red through the autumn haze, near to the western horizon.

“Aren’t you glad we came, Jibby?” urged Sin, ecstatically.

“Jibby … another of those names of yours, I suppose,” teased Ethan, gently.

“No, not my name at all,” she told him, holding her head the least bit higher. “My school name is Stella, because it is the Latin for Star. I was called Yellow Star before that, because it is the English of my own name.”

“And that is?”

“I do think you could not pronounce it, but I will say it very slowly. Wee-chah´-pee-zee´-wee—like that. No, the second syllable is rough—in the throat—so!”

“Aspirate,” suggested Miss Morrison; and each in turn tried to pronounce the queer name, with varying success.

“I chose that name for myself when I was four years old,” Stella went on, quite seriously. “I was looking up through the teepee door at the bright yellow stars overhead. I did not like the name the old women gave me; it is a sad name; Ish-na´-nee-un´-lah—The-One-who-was-left-Alive!”

Everybody was listening eagerly, for the brave little exile seldom spoke of herself unless in answer to a direct question, and a curious sort of dignity that she had about her forbade too close questioning. Now it seemed that the unspoken comradeship of the hour had unloosed her tongue, and something, too, of the softness and quiet pathos of the late November afternoon had crept into her expressive voice.

She raised her eyes to the four sympathetic faces that were gazing straight into her own, and the color rose under her clear, dark skin as she asked:

“Shall I tell you how they came to give me that sad name?”

“Oh, do!” “Tell us, tell us!” chorused the girls; but Ethan sat a little apart, and seemed absorbed in whittling a stick that he had picked up under the great pine.

“You have all heard of the fight at Wounded Knee?” began Yellow Star. “Perhaps you know how they fought—troops in uniform with big guns, against women and children and men whose guns had been taken from them?” (They nodded gravely.) “Well, it was three days after the fight that a party went out from the agency, eighteen miles away, to bury the dead Indians. The agency doctor went with them, and it was he who found wrapped in blankets, in her dead mother’s arms, and lying partly covered with snow—for there had been a snow-storm on the day before—a little baby, alive and crying.

“They threw the mother’s body into the great pit with more than a hundred others; but a kind woman of the camp took the baby home and fed and took care of it. That baby was me!

“That is why I do not know who my father and mother were, or whether I have a single relation in this world. There is no way to find out, for nearly all my father’s band were killed by the soldiers on that day, and there were many babies who died, and no one knows who I am. And that is why the old women called me The-One-who-was-left-Alive!”

That was all. A very simple little story, very quietly told; but somehow no one who heard it had much to say. With one accord they all got up from the mossy log and set out for home. Presently they began to talk again about other things, and even to laugh as lightly as before. Just as they parted, Ethan slipped into Yellow Star’s hand the thing he had shaped with his knife from a splinter of pine while she told her story. It was a little, five-pointed star.

CHAPTER V
IN WOLCOTT’S WOODS

“For the land sakes!” exclaimed Grandma Brown, knitting faster and faster, as was her wont when disturbed in mind. “Why don’t that Parker girl’s mother let her dresses down, I want to know? ’Pears to me her legs get longer an’ longer every day! I see her tearin’ down the hill a spell ago, with that outlandish dog o’ hers in full chase, and all I could think of was a hen-turkey with its wings spread out, tryin’ to get away from a fox.”

“Why, mother! Cynthia is only a little girl,” observed Doris’ mother, in quiet amusement.

“Same age as our Doris, ain’t she? When I was young, gals was women at fourteen, an’ expected to quit playin’ with the boys, wear their dresses to their shoe-tops an’ be pretty-behaved.”

“I wish mother’d let me wear my dresses to the tops of my shoes,” put in Doris, demurely. “I’m three months older than Cynthia, anyway.” She had opened the sitting-room door just in time to hear the last speech, but was careful not to commit herself to the rest of her grandma’s program.

“You all going out to your uncle’s place again to-day, Doris?” asked her mother, indulgently. “I see Cynthia’s here, but where are the others?”

“Oh, Stella had her Saturday work to do, and couldn’t get ’round before two o’clock, she said. It’s most that, now,” and she turned again to the window. No one was in sight except Cynthia and Scotty, who were joyously running races up and down the yard.

Here Mother Brown disappeared into the pantry, possibly to put up a bag of her fat, brown cookies, and Doris hunted in the hall closet for her white sweater, while Grandma commented shrewdly:

“That gal’s more of a woman than any the rest of ye, if she is an Injun.”

“Wolcott’s Woods” had become a favorite resort since that Thanksgiving ramble which had brought the three friends closer together, and the fact that the woods belonged to Doris’ Uncle Si, together with the further consideration that the “new teacher” usually went with the girls, had satisfied their respective mothers of their safety on these excursions. There was talk of snow-shoes and skis, and later of fishing-rods and flower-baskets, but just what went on in Wolcott’s Woods no one knew exactly, for the “Clover-Leaf” was a secret society of three, with Ethan Honey, Miss Morrison and Uncle Si as honorary members.

Presently Stella and her teacher appeared, and the four set out at once—or five, counting in the irrepressible Sir Walter, whose care-free bark voiced the adventurous spirit of the holiday party. It was a warm Saturday in April—one of the few days when our New England spring really opens her heart to the wayfarer, and from time to time they were overtaken by country teams whose occupants gazed curiously, even pityingly, upon them. Once a farmer returning homeward with an empty lumber wagon offered the whole party “a lift,” which proposal was gracefully evaded by Miss Morrison. It always amused her to note that the “natives” evidently could not conceive of any one’s walking for pleasure, or indeed walking at all, unless he were frankly too poor to ride.

“Let’s go round to the house, first,” whispered Doris, hanging to Miss Morrison’s arm, when they were almost there. The child had a coaxing way with her that was not easy to resist; and, moreover, Uncle Si’s late russet apples were not to be despised at this time of the year. So they all wandered up to the side door of the low, white farmhouse, with the square, forbidding front and homely, inviting back premises characteristic of its type.

The door into the summer kitchen stood wide open, and an inquisitive hen or two had actually crossed the threshold; yet repeated knocks brought no answer. Cynthia and Scotty had already dashed off in the direction of the barn-yard, from which there presently came sounds so suggestive of rustic revelry that the others precipitately followed.

“I told him he didn’t dast to ride one o’ the cows,” shrieked Sin, faint with laughter, “and he’s done it! Look, oh, look! It’s as good as the circus—better!”

Even Miss Morrison couldn’t resist the spectacle of Ethan Honey’s long legs gripping the sides of his reluctant horned steed, his face wearing a smile of mingled triumph and embarrassment as he was borne at a gallop round and round the enclosure, with Scotty yapping delightedly at his heels. In another minute or so, without slackening his speed, the young man had alighted quite informally at their feet. He rose and felt mechanically for his cap, which had disappeared, while he gravely remarked:

“Your house is quite finished. I think I saw a ‘For Rent’ sign in the window to-day!”

The great secret was out! The trio of friends had early felt the common need of a tangible house o’ dreams, and now the primitive shelter they craved had taken shape in Uncle Si’s hospitable woods, and chiefly under Ethan’s capable and willing hands.

“Let’s go right over now and have our housewarming,” demanded practical Doris. “Where’s Uncle Si?”

“He went to the store right after dinner,” Ethan answered, “and I’ll have plenty of time to finish my chores after you go. I’ve been helping afternoons and Saturdays for quite a while. Would any of you care for a drink of fresh buttermilk? I churned this morning.”

Well, there are worse things than the soothing acid of that velvet drink to wash the dust from one’s throat after a three-mile tramp. It wasn’t many minutes before Ethan was leading the way to the woods, his pockets sagging with apples, while Sin had stuffed her sailor blouse, and Doris’ sweater was quite knobby with the same.

There were more shrieks of rapture, naturally, when the girls spied their ingenious shack of fresh-cut evergreen boughs, which had been thrust into the ground in a circle and cleverly interlaced so as to make the hut all but water-tight. There was an opening left for a door—rather small, it is true, but still satisfactory—with another, smaller and higher up, for a window; and so neat and careful had been the young builder’s craftsmanship that the ferns on the threshold were scarcely more disturbed than they might have been by the nest-building of a bird.

The party stooped one by one to the oval door, and exclaimed over the fascinations of the shadowy interior, which reminded Yellow Star vividly of the conical wigwams of her people. The little house was quite bare and empty, and redolent of the scent of fern and pine.

“We ought to have a couch of fir-balsam,” suggested Miss Morrison, who had spent a summer in the Adirondacks.

Cynthia proposed an armful of thick moss, while ease-loving Doris declared that for her part she preferred to bring out a hammock.

“What makes you so quiet, Jibby?” demanded Sin, as they stepped forth into the open, under the skyey roof.

“I feel in my heart what I have no words to say,” murmured the Indian girl.

“Our neighbors would be quite as well pleased, perhaps, if we were all as quiet as Stella,” suggested Ethan, quickly.

“What neighbors do you mean? Uncle Si doesn’t care how much noise we make,” remarked literal Doris.

“No; but my oven-bird does,” and the boy pointed out a shy, golden-crowned bird that was apparently reconnoitering the gay party with some anxiety, from behind a sheltering clump of laurel.

“Is its nest near by?” “Oh, show us, do!” came from one and another.

The nest was a curious one, oven-shaped, as the bird’s name would suggest, with an opening at the side through which the first of four speckled eggs could be dimly seen. But Ethan would not allow them to come too near, or linger too long. The little mother was already uttering cries of distress, and feigning lameness to draw them away from her treasure.

“How is your crow doing?” queried Miss Morrison, as they all sat down on the threshold of their “House in the Woods” to christen it with the first social meal. It had been settled that there was to be a stone hearth laid for coffee-boiling before the next Saturday.

“Fine,” Ethan responded, throwing an apple high in the air, and catching it skilfully as it fell. “He can walk ’most as well as ever, and eats out of my hand. I’m thinking of slitting his tongue and teaching him to talk,” he added.

“Ethan found a young crow with his leg broken, by stone-throwing boys, probably, and set it quite successfully,” the teacher explained to Stella, who glowed visibly, but said nothing.

“Well, Doctor, I promise to send for you next time I fall out of the cherry-tree,” crowed Sin, whose climbing days were by no means over, in spite of Grandma Brown.

“Uncle Si is getting ready to go to bed by this time, and we ought to be going home to supper,” announced Doris, soberly, as the April sun dropped into a bank of haze in the quiet west.

“‘Silas Wolcott is dreadful sot,’ as Grandma Brown says,” chimed in Ethan. “Many’s the time he’s been offered a good price, in hard cash, for this bit of pine, but his answer is always the same. ‘It’s been in the family for quite some time: I guess I won’t sell just yet.’

“You know, don’t you, that he’s never missed being in his bed by seven o’clock in the evening, winter or summer, for forty years? That’s just one of his little ways. He’s got lots of them; one’s drinking buttermilk three times a day, and another is never setting foot inside a church. I forget how that started, but they say he stood just outside an open window at Doris’ mother’s wedding! But for all that he’s a good-hearted old chap as ever lived, and I wish he was my uncle,” the boy ended, honestly enough.

And the stranger, who was already forgetting her strangeness, secretly echoed the wish.

“Oh, these dear, real people!” she said to herself, as they all turned homeward together, leaving the darling House in the Woods to its invisible neighbors and companions of the night. “They are all so—so folksy, as Grandma Brown says. It really does begin to seem as if I belonged!”

CHAPTER VI
A WILD WEST PERFORMANCE

“Oh, Doris, darling! how can I bear it? The very meanest, disappointingest thing that ever happened in this world! Oh, oh!” and poor Sin threw herself face downward on the grass in Doctor Brown’s back yard and sobbed tumultuously. All of her friend’s blandishments were of no effect, and she remained dead to the world until Scotty’s cold nose poked inquisitively into her ear aroused her at last. Springing to her feet, she rebuked him with energy, and only then consented to retail her woes.

“Buffalo Bill’s coming to Westwood next week, and will you believe it, mother won’t take me! Says it’s too hot, and circuses and such things always give her a headache. And you know it’s been the dream of my life to see Buffalo Bill! There now, Doris Brown, see if you wouldn’t cry!”

“Um, um,” was all Doris said, for she was a maid of action rather than of many words. The case, as it seemed to her, was by no means hopeless, but she reserved her judgment.

Having had her cry out and relieved her feelings, Cynthia was soon engaged in a boisterous game with Sir Walter and an old tennis-ball that he had rooted out of some hiding-place or other, while canny Doris slipped into the house and shortly returned with a plate full of Mother Brown’s famous raisin cookies, and a piece of news that quite electrified her impulsive friend.

“Mother says, if your mother’ll let you go with us, she’ll take a party to Westwood to the matinee—you an’ me an’ Stella an’ Ethan an’ Miss Morrison too, if she wants to go,” she calmly stated.

And so it fell out that on the appointed Saturday afternoon in July, a radiantly happy party of six occupied seats in the big tent; the three girls looking their prettiest in simple white frocks, Ethan solemn as an owl in glasses and a natty linen suit, and good Mrs. Brown sweltering in the inevitable black dress of village propriety, but all alike absorbed in the stirring spectacle.

The Rough Riders of all nations and costumes; the wonderful rifle-shooting of the short-skirted, sombreroed cow-girl, the hair-raising hold-up of the ancient stage-coach—each and all yielded a separate thrill; but of course the best of all were the Indians—real, painted, plumed, ferocious warriors and daring horsemen of the plains! Everybody drew a long breath when they galloped into the arena.

“Doesn’t it make you think of home?” whispered Cynthia to Stella, with characteristic frankness speaking out what the others had only thought.

“Well, you see,” objected Yellow Star, “our men all dress like farmers now, and ’most all wear their hair short. I never saw anything like this before—except once on a Fourth of July, when some white people paid our Indians to dress up and give a war-dance.”

“But—but they used to dress this way?” faltered Sin, rather taken aback, while the rest pricked up their ears.

“Well, not when they went to war, anyway. They wouldn’t want to be bothered with all those fixings if they really had to ride far, or fight, or anything like that. I think, myself, they only dressed up at councils and dances, and maybe not quite so much, even then,” (with just a flicker of a smile.) “I know one thing: lots of those beaded things are not Sioux.”

“Not Sioux, my dear! Why, what do you mean?” wondered Mrs. Brown.

“You see, Mrs. Brown,” explained Stella, “most of these very men are Sioux from our agency. I used to hear Father Waring and the agent talking about the show people. There are men at home, and a few women, that have been all over this country and in England and France and Germany. One of them brought home a German wife who didn’t know a word of our language, and he couldn’t speak German, either!

“Now, here they are, dressed up in all the beaded things they could make or beg or borrow from some other tribe—not Sioux at all! To us, that looks as if you wore a fireman’s boots and trousers and a priest’s cassock and a soldier’s hat,” she suggested, with another little quirk at the corners of the serious mouth, but subsided when she observed that several people beside their own party were listening with evident interest.

After the performance, four or five of the Indians passed out among the audience, and as they approached the Laurel party, Yellow Star gazed earnestly into their painted faces. She recognized several, but hesitated to speak to these men, whom, as a modest young girl of her people, she would not have thought of addressing at home, much as she longed to hear again the dear accents of her mother tongue.

At last, however, there came a woman with a child on her back, in its gorgeously beaded cradle, attracting the lion’s share of interest and attention. Many gave the mother a bit of silver in return for the privilege of a peep at its tiny face, or for one of the highly colored photographs she offered. When she actually held one out to Yellow Star among the rest, the girl couldn’t help murmuring, in the soft syllables of their native Dakota:

“Oh, I am so glad to see you! Don’t you know me? I am from home, too; I am The-One-who-was-left-Alive!”

The woman stared, then seized Stella’s hands eagerly and burst into a flood of low-voiced dialect. The two unconsciously made a picture which was thoroughly appreciated by several of the bystanders. The tall, slim girl in her virginal white frock and modest hat, with the big, black bow tying up her heavy braids of hair, stood glowing all over her expressive face and quite forgetting her shyness, while the sad and rather stolid countenance of the gaudily attired stranger softened and brightened wonderfully at the sight of a friend.

“Oh, the dear baby!” cooed Yellow Star, presently, lifting a corner of the shawl and looking closely at the little olive face. “But he doesn’t look well!” she exclaimed, anxiously.

“He is sick for two days now, and I know not what to do, for we must travel all time and it is so bad for him,” grieved the mother, looking at her with the pleading black eyes of a hurt animal. “My husband, Young Eagle, he say it is nothing; but me, I not like to dress him up and take around for the white people to stare at when he is sick.”

“Take him back to your tent, now, or wherever you stay, and bring Young Eagle to me. I will talk to him,” flashed Yellow Star, and she turned to her party with an impulsive:

“I must go with her for a little while, please: she is my friend; she is in trouble and among strangers.”

“I’ll go with you, dear,” put in Miss Morrison, quickly. “We will meet you at the station, Mrs. Brown; or no—I must take an earlier train; but there is time to go with Stella and the baby first—” and before any one could speak they were all three lost in the crowd, followed by admiring and envious glances from Cynthia and Doris, who fancied that a glimpse behind the scenes must hold more of wonder and romance than all the rest.

Neither Stella nor her teacher was at the station when the others arrived, and after a thorough search took the 5.40 train, remembering that Miss Morrison had said something about an engagement, and having to leave early, and in any case she would surely have kept Stella with her.

Great was the consternation, therefore, when they reached Laurel and found that Mrs. Waring had seen or heard nothing of her “little girl,” while a telephone message to Miss Morrison disclosed the fact that she had been obliged to hurry away and leave Stella with her new-found friends, who were to see that she met her party at the station in time for the 5.40.

The long, hot, dusty day was sinking into twilight, and the precious waif last seen with a travelling show, in a strange city twenty miles from home! Miss Morrison was conscience-smitten, Lucy Waring in tears, in which Cynthia and Doris were quite ready to join, and poor Mrs. Brown all but overcome by this unexpected ending to their exciting day.

There was no train for Westwood that night. Of course, there were always the telegraph and telephone, but no one knew just how to reach any responsible person, or even whether the “Wild West” might not be already on its way to Hartford or elsewhere. That, Miss Sophia said, was in all probability the case.

“You may be sure,” she announced, with her usual cold precision, “that the wretched child has run away with the show. What else could you expect, indeed, after deliberately putting her in the way of temptation? You will remember that I advised against it from the first. The sight of the beads and feathers and all the rest of the savage finery was too much for her, no doubt, and she will be exhibiting herself in them, if possible, this very evening. Perhaps this painful incident may convince you, my dear Lucy, that you can not make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear!”

After all, the only person to keep all his wits about him in this emergency was Ethan Honey. That youth stopped to consult nobody, but hastily recollecting that an express train for Westwood stopped at the next town, three miles off, in twenty minutes, he felt in his pockets to assure himself that he had just money enough for the fare, sprang on his bicycle and was off. Breathless and dusty, he arrived barely in time to turn the wheel over to the agent and board the express, which landed him at eight o’clock in the evening, anxious, supperless and penniless, among the flaring lights of the big town.

CHAPTER VII
BEHIND THE SCENES

The corner of the big sleeping-tent allotted to Young Eagle and his wife and baby was untidy enough, with a smell of paints and grease and buckskin on the hot, close air. Dexterously Yellow Star rolled the baby out of his heavy, beaded cradle and took him in her arms.

He was quiet, even for an Indian baby; unnaturally quiet, she thought; and there was a pinched look about the tiny, expressionless features that went straight to her heart.