Turning to the mother, Seger very gently said: “I do not like to do this, Wahiah; it hurts my heart as it does yours, but it was necessary. Tomacham, once I was a soldier—like you. I was taught to obey. You may kill me for this, but the Great Father at Washington will say, ‘Miokany died doing his duty.’ I know how hard it is for you to plow and reap and do as the white man does, but it must be done or you will die. Your children can do nothing till they learn to speak the tongue. I am here to do that work. The children must stay in school. They must obey me. I do not whip good children who obey—only those who are bad. Now you old people go home and think over what I have said, and we will return to our lessons.”
Then a wonderful, an incredible, thing happened! Tomacham rose and took Seger’s hand and shook it silently in token of conviction. But Wahiah, the mother of Atokan, with tears still streaming down her cheeks, pressed the teacher’s hand in both of hers and looked into his face as if to speak, but could not; then snatching her son’s symbols of freedom, his bow and arrows, she broke them over her knee and stamped on the fragments in the face of all the school. “Obey Miokany,” she commanded, with Spartan vigor, and, turning swiftly, went out, followed by the sad and silent chieftain.
NISTINA
NISTINA
There was lamentation in the lodges of Sunmaker’s people, for the white soldiers had taken away the guns of Hawk’s young warriors, and now they were to be sent away into lands of captivity. Huddled in big wagons, the young men sat, downcast and sullen, ashamed to weep, yet choking with grief and despair.
“Had I known this,” said Hawk to the captain of the escort, “I would have died fighting,” and this defiant word he uttered in the harsh, booming tone of a village crier. It was heard by everyone in the camp, and the old women broke forth into wailing war songs, which made the fingers of sedate old sages clinch.
But the blue-coated soldiers, ranked and ready, stood with loaded guns in their hands, calmly observant, and the colonel sat his horse, not far away, ready to give the signal for departure.
Hawk, young, handsome, and reckless, for some ruffianism put upon him by a band of cattlemen, had organized a raid of retaliation, and for this outbreak the government was sending him and his band to Florida—a hot, strange land, far in the South. He, as its unconquered leader, sat bound and helpless in one of the head wagons, his feet chained to a rod, his hands ironed, and working like the talons of an eagle.