Produced by Prepared by Al Haines.
BIG AND LITTLE SISTERS
A Story of an Indian Mission School
By THEODORA R. JENNESS
CHAPTER I.
It was a Saturday morning in December at the Indian Mission School. Two young Sioux girls were going up the stairs—Hannah Straight Tree and Cordelia Running Bird. It was their Saturday for cleaning. The two girls drew a heavy breath in prospect of the difficult task that confronted them. The great unplastered mission building was a chilly place throughout the winter, and the halls and stairway that morning were drafty from the blustering wind that swept the Dakota plains and came through the outer doors below, where restless children kept going to and fro continually. The young hall-girls shivered on the upper landing, and stepped back in a sheltered niche in which the brooms were hanging. They had thrown their aprons over their heads and shoulders, and were dreading to begin their work.
"My floor and stairs always look nicer than your floor and stairs," said
Hannah Straight Tree to Cordelia Running Bird.
"Because you have the teachers' side, and that's always nicer, to begin with, than the girls' side," answered Cordelia Running Bird. "You know the teachers never walk whole-feet when you are scrubbing. If they have to go by, they walk tiptoe, and their toes are sharp and clean and do not make big tracks. But all the children on my side walk whole-feet over the wet floor when I am scrubbing, and their shoes are big and muddy. Ugh! big tracks they make! But I have learned the motto, every word, and I can speak that when I feel discouraged with my work." Cordelia Running Bird gazed at the motto, while the dormitory girls flocked by, and when the hall was quiet she repeated it in the peculiar monotonous tone with which an Indian pupil usually recites:
"Those who faithfully perform the task of keeping clean the dark places, the cold places and the rough places, are they to whom it may indeed be said, 'Well done.'"
"I shall not try to learn the motto, for it makes my memory tired," said Hannah Straight Tree. "I do not like to think hard or work hard. I am glad I have the teachers' side."