Uncle was sitting out on the side porch in his shirt-sleeves, and there was a nice, level stretch of turf inviting to the dance. Tune followed tune until everybody was out of breath, and the frolic ended with a weird, make-believe “Ghost Dance,” and a most realistic scalp-dance, in which the girls held at arms’ length one another’s fallen tresses, while going through steps and figures that would certainly have put an Indian brave to the blush.
The sun was getting low when the straw-lined Cinderella’s coach, driven by Ethan this time, drew up at the farmhouse porch for its happy freight of tired girls. It really did seem as if the class of 19—— had never known each other so well before, never felt so close to the soil and so pleasantly alive to the spirits of the past, as after they had shared the hospitality of the Indian girl and her big-hearted Uncle Si.
[1] For the story told by Stella, see “Wigwam Evenings,” by Charles A. and Elaine G. Eastman.
CHAPTER XIV
AN END AND A BEGINNING
The three “Clover Leaves” will never, never forget their last year at the little old academy. The square, white tower with its peremptory, sweet-toned bell that dominated their waking hours and all but ruled their dreams; the arm-in-arm saunter from school through autumn’s mellow haze, or gay exchange of greetings on the crisp winter air; the stiff portions of Latin and French and mathematics sweetened with girlish mirth and nonsense; the Senior dance and the Senior play and all the new-made dignities of that momentous year—these still haunt the charmed halls of memory, among the sweetest ghosts of life’s phantom past.
And with it all, with all the modest ambitions and the innocent vanities, there was mingled many a longing or an anxious thought of “what next”—of the real problems that lay beyond that mysterious closed door.
For most of the boys the next thing was work—just plain, every-day work on the farm or in the shop; for a few, both boys and girls, it was college or normal, and then school-teaching or another profession. Doris and her mother had no thought but of the dear home duties and the small social triumphs that beckoned so plainly, when the pretty, only daughter should have “finished her education.” But Cynthia and Stella were of a different mold, and they passed many a happy hour in sharing their confidences and their dreams, which ranged all the way from that ranch in Dakota on Stella’s allotment, which they were to run together, riding their own range triumphantly in the approved cow-girl fashion, to the glorious vision of Stella as a famous doctor and Cynthia as a great artist.