“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.