This also carried its vexations, for Chip was as tall as Miss Phinney and a little larger. Not one of that band of pupils was over twelve. To join in their games was no sport for Chip, while they, having heard about her thrilling experiences, with a hint that she wasn’t quite right in her head, felt afraid of her.
“I feel so sorry for her,” Miss Phinney explained to Angie, a week later, “and yet, I don’t know what to do. She is so big the children won’t play with her, or she with them. I am the only one with whom she will talk, and she seems so humble and so grateful for every word. I can’t be as stern with her or govern her as I should, on account of her temper and size.
“Only yesterday I heard screaming at recess, and going out, I found that Chip had one of the girls by the hair and was cuffing her. It transpired that this girl had called her an Indian and asked if she had ever scalped anybody. I can’t punish such a pupil, and I can’t help loving her, so you see she is a sore trial.”
She also became a trial to Angie in countless ways.
Of a deep religious conviction, and believing this waif needed to be brought into the fold, Angie set about that task at once. But Chip was impervious to such instruction. By no argument or persuasion could Angie force her protégée to renounce her belief in the heathenism of Old Tomah, or convince her that God and the angels were any different from his collection of spirit forms, or that heaven was anything more than another name for his happy hunting-grounds. Old Tomah had been her wise and only friend, so far. She had seen all the ghostly forms he had described, had felt all the occult influences which he said existed, and neither coaxing nor derision served to make her disown them.
Of course, Angie took her to church regularly. She sat through services and bowed as all did. Sabbath-school instruction would have been forced upon her but for the reason that made her a class of one under Miss Phinney, and Parson Jones’s attention was finally enlisted.
He spent an hour in pointing out her heathenish sins, assured her that Old Tomah was a wicked reprobate and an ignorant savage combined, that all influences so far surrounding her had been the worst possible,–a self-evident fact,–and unless she confessed a change of heart, and soon, too, all her friends here would desert her and the devil would overtake her by and by, and then closed this well-intended effort with a prayer.
Chip sat through it all, mute and cowering. The parson’s white hair, sharp eyes, and solemn voice awed her, and when he had departed, she began to cry.
“I don’t see the need o’ makin’ me say I don’t believe suthin’ when I do,” she said. “I’ve seen spites ’n’ I know I’ve seen ’em, an’ nobody can make me believe Old Tomah a bad man, if he is an Injun. He runned after me when I got ketched, ’n’ near got his eyes scratched out”–a logic it was useless to contend with.
“You’re jest a little spunky devil,” Hannah said to her later on with a vicious accent, “an’ if I was Mrs. Frisbie I’d larrup ye till ye confessed penitence, I would. The idee o’ you settin’ thar a-mullin’ all the time the minister was tryin’ to save ye! It’s scand’lus!”