“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.”