Standing Cloud was not a particularly progressive chief, but he knew a pretty girl when he saw her. This was a girl of his own people, after all, and an orphan at that; everybody knew her history, and such a man as he was not to be daunted by a few years of schooling. She had sense enough, probably, to appreciate the honor he intended to do her.
His offer came in round-about fashion, first through the grandmother, as was fitting, and finally through Blue Earth, who, with many giggles and much tossing of the head, managed at last to convey some inkling of it to the astonished and indignant girl.
“That old man!” she exclaimed, in disgust. “I don’t see how you can have the face to repeat such a thing. Why, how many wives has he had?”
“Only two; and he hasn’t any now; and he’s a chief, you know.”
“That’s quite enough. I don’t wish to hear another word about him as long as I live!”
And Grandmother was left to smooth over the affair as best she might, inventing all manner of humble excuses to cover the unheard-of rejection of a man of such importance.
Then there was Moses Blackstone, a serious young man who had passed some years in the mission boarding-school as its prize scholar, and was now a lay reader in the village, and a regular caller at the field matron’s home. In default of an evening school, she innocently encouraged him to sit by the hour at a corner of her table, poring over some old school-book, or stumbling over the long words in the illustrated magazines that came from her eastern friends. Occasionally he would even write letters on her stationery and frankly “borrow” her stamps; but Moses was really such a good young man, and so earnest and humble, that she lent him a helping hand whenever she could, with scarcely more self-consciousness than if he had been Chaskay’s age.
If he took unusual pains with his dress of late, the fact had escaped her, as also that he was not at all a bad speaker in his native Dakota. His English was inadequate, and she always made him talk to her in English, thus cruelly putting him at a disadvantage.
Therefore Stella was honestly shocked when one day Grandmother slyly pressed into her hand a little folded note, and upon carelessly opening it, she found a regular love-letter, signed “Moses.”