By the time they had returned from their inspection, Clement Paddingstowe, Phillis’ father, had appeared, and supplemented his daughter’s cordial invitation that they stay to tea. Trubee might have remained, but Black Chief’s Daughter, though she was again urged by Phillis and her father, seemed[seemed] disinclined to partake of the hospitality. They rode down the drive all a changed party. The Indian girl had heard Trubee accept an invitation to return to “Corydon” in the near future, and noted his admiring glances at her fair person; she felt for the first time that she stood no chance against a white girl of gentle blood, though her own native antecedents were of as noble quality, for was she not Black Chief’s Daughter, and the granddaughter of the undefeated warrior, Destroy-Town?
She was silent and hung her head the whole way back to Steamburg. Phillis, though delightfully courteous by nature, seemed a trifle distant to the little Colonel that evening. Simon Black Chief was piqued at himself for having brought unhappiness to his sister. Christian Trubee was in love with Phillis Paddingstowe. Nevertheless, the young collegian was too much a man of the world not to value the kindnesses bestowed on him by Simon and his Sister, their parents and other Indians of the reservation, to become suddenly cold and indifferent. Yet, alone, he wondered why he had ever for a minute contemplated marrying an Indian girl, and how slight would be their spiritual intercourse? Yet he was here underrating Black Chief’s Daughter, who was not of the earth-earthy, and had called herself to him “an imaginative person.”
He tried to be polite and attentive to the Indian girl, but she noted that on several occasions where she planned trips for certain days, he demurred on account of engagements at “Corydon.” His manner was different; the Indian girl, uncannily intuitive, would not be deceived. The summer wore along, and Trubee saw that he could not keep up pleasing Black Chief’s Daughter, a break must come somehow. And the neglected maiden, unknown to him, was reading his every thought, and prepared to make that break first.[first.] She had brought some late huckleberries to Pat Smith’s wife at the long house, where she was told that Trubee had been absent for three days at “Corydon”; that it was rumored he would marry Clement Paddingstowe’s daughter in the Fall.
As she walked along the path between the yellow, half-dead grasses, swinging the little iron pot that had contained the berries, she began planning for the dissolution of her unhappy romance. There were many May apples or mandrakes ripening in the low places, and, stooping, she uprooted several plants, half filling the pot with them. Then she left the trail, and started across the meadow toward a group of ancient hemlock trees, beneath which was the Cold Spring. Near the spring were large, flat stones laid up like seats, and the remains of some stone hearths where the Indians often roasted corn. She had her flints and steel with her, and gathered enough dry twigs and punk to light a fire. Then she sat down on one of the flat stones and, with her hands over her face, she reviewed the story of her love for Trubee. He had cared for her at first; that was consolation, but she was helpless beside the white rival; red blood was as nothing beside blue. Then she nervously tramped out the fire, as if to start on again. This life was a very little thing, after all; if her dream had failed in this existence, better end it, and come back again and fulfill it, even as a flower or bird; it was impossible to prevent living again. She began to munch the roots of the May apples which she had gathered, and then began to walk across the fields toward the graveyard which contained the tomb of “Indian Brown,” the bad man.
As she came near the road which led to “Corydon” she made an effort to run across it, but in the middle of it a dizziness seized her, then a sharp pain, and she staggered and dropped in a heap, the dust rising from the dry highway as she fell. The sand got in her eyes, nose and mouth as she lay on the path, her legs twisting in convulsive spasms. The sun was beginning to sink close to the tops of the long, rolling summits of the western mountains as the form of a horseman came in sight away down the long stretch of level road. It was Christian Trubee returning from “Corydon,” flushed with the progress of his love making with the fair and dainty Phillis Paddingstowe. He saw a black object in the road; a wool sack fallen from some wagon, was his first conjecture. Coming closer, he perceived it to be a human being, a woman, Black Chief’s Daughter.
He threw the bridle rein over the little mare’s head and sprang to the ground. As he caught the limp form of the Indian girl in his arms, she half opened her eyes and looked up at him.
"Oh, Mr. Trubee, let me be, I pray of you; let me stay here and die; I haven’t anything more to live for since we visited at ‘Corydon’."
The young man did not know how to answer her, for he was honest always. He lifted her on the saddle behind him, holding the long, lean arms around his waist, while her head bobbed on his shoulder, and started the little trappy black at a trot for the long house. It was supper time as he neared the old hotel. In order to avoid attention, he rode up to the kitchen door, at the back of the house. A small, ugly, very black colored boy, with a banjo, from Jamestown, was strumming a Negro melody to amuse the cooks.
“Get on this horse quick, boy,” Trubee called to him, as he dismounted with his limp burden, “and bring over Doctor Forrester; Black Chief’s Daughter is in a bad way from poison.”
Pat Smith’s wife and the other cooks ran out, and, taking in the situation at a glance, carried the almost unconscious but uncomplaining girl into the house where they laid her on a bench in the dance hall, all unknown to the guests, munching their huckleberry pie in the nearby dining room. The Doctor’s buggy was standing in front of his cottage, and putting his horse to a gallop he raced the little Negro back to the hotel. It did not take him long, as he was a noted herbalist, to diagnose the case as poison from May apple root, very deadly, but a drastic Indian emetic, administered just in time, preserved her life.