“Father, let me take my son to the lodge. Then he will get well.”
He shook his head. “No, that would not do. He would die on the way. Let him stay here till he is better. You and I will watch over him here. No harm will come then. See how nice and clean his bed is, how sheltered his room is. It will be cold and windy in camp; he will be made worse. Let him remain till he is able to stand. Then it will be safe to take him away.”
By putting forth all his powers of persuasion he comforted and reassured the distracted mother, and she sat down in the hospital; but an understanding that she wanted to have Tah-You the medicine man visit the boy and breathe upon him and sing to him ran round the school and the agency, and the missionaries and the nurse were furious.
“The idea of that nasty old heathen coming into the hospital!” said the nurse to one of the teachers. “If he comes, I leave—that’s all!”
The doctor laughed. “The old cuss might do him good. Who knows?”
The Reverend Jones pleaded with Williams: “Don’t permit it. It will corrupt the whole school. Deep in their hearts they all believe in the old medicine man, and if you give in to them it will set them all back ten years. Don’t let them take Robert to camp on any plea. All they want to do is to smoke and make gibberish over him.”
To these impassioned appeals Williams could only say: “I can’t order them not to do so. They are free citizens under our present law, and I have no absolute control over them. If they insist on taking Robert to camp, I can’t stop them.”
Mr. Jones went away with a bitter determination to make some kind of complaint against somebody, to something—he couldn’t quite make up his mind to whom.
Then old Tah-You came, very grave and very gentle, and said: “Father, the Great Spirit in the beginning made both the white man and the red man. Once I thought we could not be friends and live on the same soil. I am old now and wise in things I once knew nothing of. I now see that the white man knows many good things—and I know also that the red man is mistaken about many other things. Therefore we should lay our medicines side by side, and when we have chosen the better, throw the worthless one away. I have come to put my curative charms and my lotions beside those of the white medicine man. I will learn of him, he will learn of me. This sick boy is my grandson. He is very ill. I ask you to let me go in to him, and look upon him, and smoke the sacred pipe, and breathe upon him, and heal him with strong decoction of roots.”