“What is it, Kitty? What do you see? What do you see?”
“The horses! White, black, and—Chestnut! It’s Wahneenah! Wahneenah!”
Four watched her disappear behind a clump of bushes that hid the sandhills from his lower sight, then hurried back to the new cabin, crying out:
“Father, father! She’s run away again! We’ve lost her!”
Before the minister could be made to comprehend his son’s excited story, voices without drew him to the entrance. Even to him the name of Indian had, in those days, a sinister significance. Yet, as he reached the threshold, there were the Sun Maid’s arms about his neck and her ecstatic declaration:
“It’s my darling Other Mother! She’s come! She’ll live with us! And the Black Partridge; and Osceolo, and Tempest, and Snowbird, and the Chestnut! Oh, all together again; how happy we shall be!”
“Eh? What? Yes, yes, of course,” assented the Doctor, though he cast a rather perplexed glance about his limited apartments. “Well, if it’s to be part of my work, I am ready,” he added resignedly, and not without thought of the quiet study which would be out of the question in a tenement so crowded.
The chief and the clergyman had met before, during the former’s last visit to the Fort, and they greeted each other suavely, as would two white gentlemen of culture and unquestioned standing. Then, while the Sun Maid drew Wahneenah aside and exhibited the cabin, the two men talked together and rapidly became friends.
“The Lord never shuts one door but He opens another. I came here to instruct, hoping to pass far onward into the wilderness. Behold! the heathen are at my very threshold. He took away my wife and sent me a daughter. Now, at her heels, follows a woman of the race I came to help, who looks more noble than most of her white sisters. As the Sun Maid said, shall we not do? Only—where to house them?”