Yet it was not those silvery sheets of hissing water, drenching to the skin all who might be abroad, that one really minded—not at all! It was—ah! the play of forked lightnings, awfully bright, and the ear-splitting thunder-crash that could do no harm, one knew, but that was so dreadful for all that. Yellow Star’s Indian blood fairly curdled within her in the face of this close strife of the elements; for brave as her people truly were, the angry moods of nature were to them full of threat and awful personality. And yet, to-night, her grief was such that even the forked tongues of the “Thunder Birds” could not really terrify her, and she ran on.
In the rude shelter raised by friendly hands and connected with some of the happiest hours of her short life, there among the grave neighbor pines hiding their frightened nestlings, the girl from far Dakota cried aloud in long-forgotten Indian fashion—cried and mourned in rhythmic cadence, wild as the sobbing wind in the tree-tops—there told in her own dear tongue to those shivering sister woods all the secrets of her storm-tossed heart.
“Oh!” she cried, standing straight up in the tiny shack and flinging her strong young arms above the streaming black head with a tragic gesture, “oh, it is worse even than when I lost my own mother and was too young to know! I only knew what they told me—how they threw my poor Dakota mother into that awful pit, with no coffin and no prayer—and how I could never, never know her name or how she looked, or whether I was all the child she ever had, or anything! And the white man’s cruel bullets had torn her poor body … and yet in all her pain her last thought was for me … to keep me warm and alive. I meant to prove that I was worth keeping alive … and I hoped she might, somehow, know.
“And then, there were those kind Indian women—Blue Earth’s mother, and Mrs. Driving Hawk, and the rest, who took care of me as well as they could. They were poor and very frightened and most had babies of their own, and it was very, very kind of them to feed a useless little fretting baby without any relations, whose people had nearly all been killed by the soldiers of the Great Father at Washington.
“To be sure, I have often heard my dear Mother Waring say that when she found me I was very dirty, and looked hungry and miserable. Many of the Dakota children who had mothers and fathers, too, were hungry, and ’most all were dirty, I’m afraid, back there on the reservation. It wasn’t all their fault; I know it wasn’t.
“I was about five when Mother Waring took me away; very thin and ugly, and oh! so frightened of the white people! She used to tell me about it afterward, to make me laugh. She had my ragged little Dakota dress and moccasins put away, the ones I had on the day she took me home to her house, and washed and dressed and fed me, and put me at night in a clean, white bed next her own. I cried half that first night, she told me, and begged to go back to the Indian camp, where I might curl up in a dirty quilt in any one of half a dozen smoky teepees.
“Then, after awhile, I got fat and contented, and I loved her dearly, and began to be afraid of the Indian women. But she wouldn’t have that, either; she always made me shake hands with them, and wouldn’t let me forget my own language when I learned the English. And I went to church and Sunday School and learned about Our Father who art in heaven; and after a great while Father and Mother Waring seemed just like my real father and mother on earth.
“Then dear Father Waring left us and went to heaven, too; and we came to Laurel to live. It’s been beautiful here; all but Miss Sophia. I have so many friends in Laurel—I really did begin to think I belonged—and if I could only stay long enough to graduate, there are so many things I could do.
“But now I seem to see it all. Now Mother Waring is gone, I haven’t any folks, anywhere. Miss Sophia doesn’t love me a single bit. There are just Doris and her father and mother, and Cynthia and Grandma Brown and Uncle Si and Miss Morrison—yes, Ethan too, though I haven’t seen him for ever and ever so long—all just friends, not folks,—and I shall be left out of everything, again. Oh, dear! I am nobody’s little girl!”
After supper that same evening, when the summer tempest had subsided to a gentle, purring down-pour of warm rain, and while Yellow Star, scarcely yet missed from the gloomy house of mourning, lay exhausted with crying on her bed of boughs, in her wet garments, away out in Wolcott’s Woods, her good friends were discussing her future and the practical bearings of her great loss, with true village simplicity.