Chapter XIV: An End and a Beginning

The three “Clover Leaves” will never, never forget their last year at the little old academy. The square, white tower with its peremptory, sweet-toned bell that dominated their waking hours and all but ruled their dreams; the arm-in-arm saunter from school through autumn’s mellow haze, or gay exchange of greetings on the crisp winter air; the stiff portions of Latin and French and mathematics sweetened with girlish mirth and nonsense; the Senior dance and the Senior play and all the new-made dignities of that momentous year—these still haunt the charmed halls of memory, among the sweetest ghosts of life’s phantom past.

And with it all, with all the modest ambitions and the innocent vanities, there was mingled many a longing or an anxious thought of “what next”—of the real problems that lay beyond that mysterious closed door.

For most of the boys the next thing was work—just plain, every-day work on the farm or in the shop; for a few, both boys and girls, it was college or normal, and then school-teaching or another profession. Doris and her mother had no thought but of the dear home duties and the small social triumphs that beckoned so plainly, when the pretty, only daughter should have “finished her education.” But Cynthia and Stella were of a different mold, and they passed many a happy hour in sharing their confidences and their dreams, which ranged all the way from that ranch in Dakota on Stella’s allotment, which they were to run together, riding their own range triumphantly in the approved cow-girl fashion, to the glorious vision of Stella as a famous doctor and Cynthia as a great artist.

The modest business in herbs and simples had led its votary to pursue her botany a little further, and make a special study of medicinal plants. She was often discovered hidden away in a corner of Doctor Brown’s office, eagerly comparing “Gray” with the “Materia Medica;” and she found, too, that Grandma Brown was more than ready to impart the neglected virtues of mullein and catnip, dock and sassafras, some of which Stella tested by personal experiment, while the girls began teasingly to call her the “Yarb-Doctor.”

Doctor Brown secretly believed nothing beyond the capacity of his favorite, but he conscientiously meant not to encourage ambitions that it might be impossible to realize.

“Those hands of Stella’s,” he impulsively remarked one day, when her future was under discussion, letting his sage eyes rest meditatively upon the long, supple, sensitive members—“well, they do say such hands can only belong to a doctor or a musician.”

“Or a mother,” unexpectedly murmured his wife.

He gave her a quick, approving look, and again the warm blood glowed in the Indian girl’s dark cheek. She suddenly remembered how Ethan had been telling her of his plans to study medicine the next year, and how she had listened with all her heart in her face, and at last cried out without thinking:

“Oh, I wish, _how_ I wish I could be a doctor, too!”

She remembered vividly the peculiar look in his eyes as he gently answered:

“I could wish it too—unless—unless you were meant for something even better, Stella.”

And she had not understood at all.

* * * * *

Before the March sun began to melt the snow-drifts, Stella’s friends got together privately and laid their plans to present her with her Commencement Day outfit. She had worn all winter the trim suit and modest hat purchased with her summer’s work in the fields, after the rows of drying shelves in Miss Sophia’s garret had been cleared of their aromatic burden. And oddly charming she looked in them—like a symphony in browns, with her gleaming agate skin and the intense black of hair and eyes for contrast. But the “weed money” was all gone, and there was no time for extra earning that last, busy year. Surely she could not be so wickedly proud as to reject an offering of true love.

Mr. Parker insisted upon purchasing the dress—a duplicate of Cynthia’s. It was fine handkerchief linen, and Mrs. Brown, who made all Doris’ clothes, would make it up simply and beautifully, while Doris devoted all her spare minutes for weeks to certain individual touches of hand embroidery. Cynthia recklessly squandered a whole month’s pocket-money on the long, white suede gloves, and Grandma Brown unearthed from among her girlhood’s treasures a sandal-wood fan of delicious memory.

Doctor Brown brought home one day a small watch cased in gun-metal with Stella’s name on it, and Miss Morrison, who had gone back to the city to teach, sent a long, curiously wrought gun-metal chain.

But the most surprising contributions came from Uncle Si Wolcott and Miss Sophia. Uncle Si actually “hitched up” and drove to Westwood for the finest pair of bronze slippers and bronze silk stockings to be bought with money. Miss Sophia had tatted a handkerchief, but being impressed at the last minute with the apparent meanness of her offering as compared with the others, she unlocked a certain bureau drawer and took from it a quaint comb of carved ivory, fetched home from China by a seafaring ancestor, which gave the crowning touch to Stella’s strange beauty, set in the swirling masses of her blue-black hair.

The girl laughed and cried when she saw them, forgetting for once all her Indian stoicism, and stroked the lovely frock with reverent fingers, saying softly:

“Do you know, dears, I can _love_ these clothes!”

* * * * *

There was one more gift, that came by mail on the very day of fate itself. It was a box just long enough to hold the diploma, the sandal-wood fan, the ivory comb, and any treasures worthy a place with these. It was cunningly made by hand out of fragrant, warm-hearted cedar-wood, fitted with a tiny lock and key, and decorated with a knife in conventionalized designs, chief of which was the recurring device of a five-pointed star. Doris and Cynthia were the only ones privileged to admire Ethan’s gift.

Next to the bride in the affections of rural New England stands the fair girl graduate, and that June day in Laurel was apparently quite given over to the triumphant parade of simple-hearted youth. In many a modest home, solicitous mothers were robing and adorning their daughters as if for the altar itself, and that evening in the town hall it seemed as if every soul in the village, old and young, rich and poor, must be pressing into a seat or peering curiously in at open door or window.

And now the orchestra struck up and the platform began to fill—that platform fluttering with banners and banked with the dark-green, glossy leaves and rosy chalices of the mountain laurel that gave the village its name. Pete Holley, a strapping youth of color, and star of the football team, took his place with dignity. Mary Maloney, the washer-woman’s daughter, more elaborately dressed than most, sat happily in the front row next to demure Doris, whose piano solo made a pleasing variation in the programme.

Stella, too, had a “part”—she and Rosey Bernstein led their class; and those who saw her on that day of days will long remember the tall, swaying figure, the gliding step, the vivid, dark face with its touch of foreign distinction among the rosy village girls, and most of all the tender, rhythmic tones that rang so true in her touching farewell to school days and to the comrades of that golden time.

For Yellow Star had made her difficult decision—to go back to her own people and do for them what she could. There had come, in the early spring, a cry for help—another dingy scrawl in scarce legible Dakota from the Indian camp on Cherry Creek. Blue Earth had a “bad heart;” her husband, Young Eagle, had left her and gone across the Big Water with the show; she had a baby girl now, and the boy was five years old. She wanted them to “walk the white man’s road,” and she wanted The-One-who-was-left-Alive to come and live with her, and teach her how to teach her children. There were many women in the camp, she said, who needed such help.

After a sleepless night with the letter under her pillow, the girl had shown it to her friends and asked their advice. In her heart, she knew that there was only one answer possible, and they read her decision in her face. Of course, Doris and Cynthia cried a little, and squeezed her hands, and begged her “not to give up her plans, darling;” while Miss Sophia held her peace with remarkable consistency and success. But Doctor Brown promptly hunted up Mr. Parker, and the two had an important conference.

“I can see she means to go, and it may be the best thing to do, for a time, at any rate,” the Doctor admitted, gruffly. “But there’s just one thing about it; that girl is not going into an Indian camp without position or backing. She’s too handsome, for one thing; and too young and trusting altogether. Young as she is, Stella is competent to fill a good place in the Government Indian Service, and that she must have!”

“I’ve been telling my wife I’d like nothing better than to send the girl through college, if she wants to go,” demurred Mr. Parker. “I think she could persuade my girl to go with her—there or anywhere! Say, Doc! are you dead sure she ought to butt in amongst a lot of half-savage Sioux—a girl who would make a place for herself in any community?”

“I don’t know much about the American Indian, but judging from our Stella, there must be good stuff in the breed,” answered the Doctor, stanchly. “She’d make a magnificent nurse—doctor, perhaps; but she’s too young to begin training yet awhile. Better let her try it out west for a year or two; she will, anyway; she’s made up her mind, and you know what that means. What I came over to ask you is have you any wires to pull that’ll land our little girl in the Indian Service? What?”

“Sure,” assented Mr. Parker, heartily. “There’s Senator Morton; he’ll do anything for me—within reason, of course. We’ll fix it up in no time.”

When Stella herself was cautiously consulted, a fortnight later, she declared that she did not know enough to teach and would rather not take a school position. She wanted to live right in the camp, she said, close to the people; to help the poor, ignorant women and children, like Blue Earth and her babies.

“Then you want to be a field matron,” pronounced the Doctor, who had been studying the subject. “Six hundred a year and the right to draw on the agency for supplies—soap and buckets and rations for sick people and all that. The work just what you would be doing anyway, and the whole United States Government back of you. That’s the talk.”

And so it came about that our eighteen-year-old Indian girl delivered her valedictory with her appointment as field matron at Cherry Creek pinned inside her white frock, right over the loving heart that beat high with the hope of service.