“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.