The Indian girl looked up, her dark eyes glowing with a new resolve. “You remember White Lily, that day just after the Christmas holidays when I told you that I felt that there must be some real mission in life for each of us?”
Virginia nodded: “Yes, I remember.”
“And you agreed. I recall that you said if we each held the finding of that mission as a definite goal, we would be led to it, and now,” the dark face was radiant, “this is what I may do for my father’s people. I shall go away to another school, White Lily, where I can learn the ways of preventing epidemics.”
How tall and straight, like an arrow, the Indian girl stood, and, in her eyes there was that far-away expression as though she were seeing a vision. Virginia thought of Joan d’Arc. That same expression was often pictured in the eyes of young women who were inspired with a high purpose and in whose hearts there was a noble resolve.
“Where shall you go, Winona?” This was no time for sentimental regrets that the friends were to be parted, their plans changed.
“I do not know. I shall speak with Mrs. Martin. She will know best how to advise me. I will go to her now.”
When Winona was gone, Virginia removed her wraps and sat before the fireplace, thinking. It was but a half hour before lunch and there was not time to attend any of the morning classes.
“Dear, wonderful Winona,” the girl from the West was thinking, “she has found her life work and she will accomplish it, whatever the obstacles may be that will arise in her path.” Then with a little sigh, Virginia thought of her own future. What did it hold for her? What worthwhile thing was she to do? Of course she would return to her beloved desert, but who was there that she could really benefit with what she had learned, as Winona would benefit her father’s remnant of a tribe? In a flash there came to the girl a picture in the fire. For three long years the little school house near the sand hills, which she and Winona had attended when they were younger, had been deserted. The storms had blown the sand high over the door-sill and the drifts, on the side toward which the wind most frequently blew were even up to the windows. Such a sad, forlorn little place it was!
And it could not be reopened. A teacher could not be hired by the State because there were only six pupils to attend it. The three little Mahoys and another three little scraggly unkempt children belonging to a dry rancher over in Wild Hog Canon. Six children who were to grow up without the rudiments of knowledge because the Board of Education would not hire a teacher for that little desert school unless there were eight pupils.
Though she did not know it, the same light was burning deep in the eyes of Virginia that she had noted a few moments before in the dark orbs of her friend. “I, even I, am responsible for those six forlorn little babies,” she was thinking. “They are my mission. Surely the State will permit a self-appointed teacher, whom they will not have to pay, to at least use the little schoolhouse that is nearly hidden in sand drifts.