At last Mr. Morten turned, and said: “Nistina, you may come this afternoon after four o’clock, and we will arrange the whole matter. I am glad you are going to forsake Indian ways, which are very bad. Be a good girl, and you will be happy.”
When Neeta had explained what he said Nistina burst into a low cry, and, covering her face with her blanket, rushed away.
“That’s the last you’ll see of her,” said Neeta, maliciously. “She likes the Indian ways best.”
But Nistina was moved by a deeper impulse than fickle-hearted Neeta could comprehend. A sick boy had returned from Florida a few days before—a poor dying lad—and to Nistina he had brought word from young Hawk. “I am studying so that I can send words on paper, like the white man,” the message ran. “By and by I will send a white word to you.”
This message instantly sank deep, although Nistina gave no sign. She had more than the usual shyness of the maidens of her tribe, and it was painful to her to have even this vague message transmitted by another.
The girl thought long. She wished to send a message to her lover, but for some days could not bring herself to confide in Neeta. Days went by, and her resolution remained unformed. Nearly every evening she had been going to see Neeta, but always her courage had failed her, and then came the thought: “I, too, will learn to write and to read, and then I can tell him how much I love him, and that I will wait till I am old and I will love no one else.”
There was a great deal of gossip among the red women. “She is going to marry a white soldier, that Nistina,” they said. “She is working for money to buy fine beads and cloth.”
“It may be,” said her stepmother. “She does not open her heart to me. She talks no more than an owl.”
The teachers marveled at ’Tina’s dullness in arithmetic and her amazing progress in writing. In an incredibly short time she was able to scrawl a note to her lover. It was a queer little letter, written with painful exactness, in imitation of the copybooks: