"Singing Bird, you must tell me the secret."
"I will."
Stella settled herself to hear the Indian girl's story.
"It began when I was a little child," said Singing Bird. "One time when my father's tribe was hunting, we came to a place where a lot of white men were digging in the sands of the big, muddy river."
"Was that the Missouri?"
"The white men call it so. We camped beside them, and one day I saw them washing out of the sand little grains of yellow metal, which they thought much of, although the Indians would rather have iron, the black metal."
"They were hunting for gold."
"Yes. In their talk with my father they said that somewhere up the river was the mother of the gold, where all this came from. They asked my father if he knew where it was.
"Now, my father had found where there was plenty of the yellow metal. But he, too, was shrewd, and, seeing that the white men prized it so highly, he thought he would go back and get the gold, and sell it to the white men for iron and shot and powder and blankets.
"The white men guessed that he knew where the mother of gold was, and asked him. But he refused to tell them, and went away.