The sister of Fiery Man stood unnoticed, we have said, in the lodge where White Moon sat with her dead child. On her back she carried a large bundle of wood. As she threw it to the ground, the noise roused White Moon from her dreams. She rose from her mat, clasping the child yet more closely to her breast. Giving one look towards her sister, in which was concentrated all the passion and all the harshness of which she was capable, she left the lodge. The crimson flush soon died away from her face, and she was calm and pale as before.
Assisted by several of the women, she proceeded to place her child upon its last resting-place. It was at some distance from the lodge, yet in sight. She returned, and carried to the place of burial the cradle and some little trinkets belonging to the child, and hung them in reach of the infant's hand, on the scaffolding.
All day she sat on the ground near it. She wept there, as only a mother can weep, for her first and only child. She refused the food the women offered her; she had not eaten since its death.
Even when night came, she was still there, through its long watches giving vent to her violent grief. The breaking of the morn found her sleeping for a short interval on the ground; on awakening, she remembered there were duties that still claimed her care. Her new buffalo-skin lodge was still unfinished, and she had promised her husband she would be in it on her return. The one they were living in was her sister's; it was an old one, torn, and admitting the rain, so that it was not comfortable. Some of the women had assisted her in making it, and she had still to finish and set it up before the evening.
On the day of the child's death she had been obliged to leave her work, to go out at some little distance to cut wood. She did not, as usual, take her child with her: it was asleep in its carved board cradle, and she left it in charge of a girl, the child of one of her friends. Fiery Man's sister had gone out, telling White Moon she should be away all day. So great was her dread of this proud woman—so fearful was she that she would revenge on her child the hatred she felt towards herself—that otherwise she would not have left the infant at home.
The anticipations of White Moon at her first interview with her husband's sister were all realized. This woman possessed all the bad qualities of Fiery Man, without any of his redeeming ones.
She had been married, and was a widow. Both of her children were dead: there was no avenue by which kindness could find its way to her heart. She disliked White Moon, because she had so won her brother's love. But there needed to assign no reason, for she disliked all who were better off than she.
It is not only in civilized life that the dread passion of envy has full sway: the human heart, the same by nature, varies only by association and circumstance.
Had it not been for the unhappy disposition of Fiery Man's sister, White Moon had been happy. She could not but be proud of her husband, and of his affection for her: it was not in the nature of a Sioux woman to see unmoved the many trophies of his skill and bravery. But the curse of envy was about her; and when White Moon smiled over her boy, and Fiery Man exulted in the pride and affection of a Sioux father for his son, his sister could not rejoice with them—she envied and hated them.