To tell the truth, it was very prettily and poetically expressed. “I am thinking of something,” it began in the native tongue. “I think of it night and day. It will not let me rest nor sleep. It is always of you that I think and of my longing to be near you, and my wish that we two might be one.”
Stella was really most unreasonable. Her cheeks glowed and her black eyes snapped. She tore the pleading little note into tiny bits, and strewed it on the floor before Grandmother’s astonished old eyes. That was her answer.
The missionary from the east who had stepped into Father Waring’s old shoes was far from finding them a fit. Though he had been there for several years, people still called him “the new minister,” a circumstance which tells its own story to the discerning. Certainly his manner was a trifle dry, even when his intentions were most kind.
It seemed to our heroine, who we know was sensitive to a fault, that everybody looked at her critically, even coldly, when she came to the agency church in her trim, tailor-made suit and tasteful little hat, and modestly took her seat among the shawled and hatless Indian women, or when, innocently conspicuous, she walked the one street on “Issue Day,” with business-like intentness upon her various errands.
She was fairly happy, upon the whole, among her own people at Cherry Creek, but with the “white people,” who should have welcomed her in all sincerity as a fellow-worker, she felt lonely and ill at ease. It was just as if the agent and his employees, the minister, and most of all their wives, were continually saying among themselves:
“How long do you suppose she’ll keep it up? Too well-dressed and too self-possessed for an Indian girl, anyway; looks as if she thought too much of herself—needs taking down a peg.”
This note of patronage and suspicion was so unlike the general attitude toward her in her New England home that Stella couldn’t help resenting it, and accordingly held her well-groomed head a trifle higher than before. There was only the little day-school teacher in Ring Thunder’s camp, Chaskay’s teacher—a simple, good-hearted girl, not much older or more experienced than Yellow Star herself—these two got on together from the first. Stella fell into the habit of going over there on “Old Soup” to spend her Sundays, since she had actually come to dread meeting any of the agency people, and after poor Moses’ unwelcome pretensions she no longer cared to attend the rather primitive but always reverent little service in his large log cabin.
Long before September came round again, Stella had learned that the annual church convocation would meet at “our agency” this year. This meant a great gathering of perhaps a thousand Indians who came from agencies hundreds of miles distant, traveling overland, for the most part, in picturesque canvas-topped wagons loaded with camp equipage, toward the appointed meeting-place. It was the event of the year to all good Christian Indians, bringing social as well as spiritual inspiration, comfort, and cheer.
Most of all, Stella looked forward to meeting the Bishop, whose face of lofty calm and sweetness, under its silvery crown of hair, floated high like a white cloud among dear memories of childhood days. In those days, he had been from time to time a guest under their roof, giving to the very food he shared a sacramental savor, and as a small, shrinking, black-eyed maid she had never lost the sense of a grave and gentle Presence in the little white guest-chamber they called the “Bishop’s Room.”