Chapter I: Laurel Folks

It was four o’clock of a hot September afternoon, and the buzz of twenty girls released from school filled the close room with a sibilant overflow, much like the gossip of bees in a blossoming elder-bush. The boys had already gone clattering down the stairs to the ball-field, and the little maids of the highest grammar grade demurely prepared to follow, sipping the sweets of freedom with more of leisurely enjoyment, in true feminine fashion.

A long, thin girl of thirteen or so, in a starched blue gingham frock nearly to her sharp knees, who looked somehow as if blown straight forward by a strong wind, and a plump bud of a fair-haired damsel in pink, stood close together in an eddy of the murmuring stream.

“I don’t think it’s fair, Doris; no, I don’t!” were the long girl’s first words earnestly spoken, as she tossed the lank locks back from her eager face with a characteristic gesture.

“Don’t think what’s fair?” queried Doris, serenely. “Oh, Sin, you’ve dropped your glasses!”

“Bother the glasses—you know what I mean. That wild Indian girl from the ‘land of the Ojibways,’ or wherever it is they say she’s coming to our school, and the girls will make her life one long misery, just because she wears a red blanket, prob’ly, and a feather or two in her straight, black hair—”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Sin Parker. She never wore a blanket in her life, so there!”

“Why—why—isn’t she a sure-’nough Indian, then, after all?” stammered romance-loving Cynthia, dropping the glasses again in her excitement. “And how do _you_ happen to know so much about it, Doris Brown?”

“Well, I do know; mother was out calling yesterday afternoon, and she’s heard all about it. I expect she’s over at the Spellman house now. You see, it’s this way…” And the two girls, with arms about each other’s waists and absorbed faces, drifted through the big doors in their turn and followed a chattering, fluttering throng down the wide, elm-lined village street.

* * * * *

In the prim parlor of an old New England homestead, watched over by the ghostly crayon portraits of departed ancestors, the fate of the brown-skinned little stranger was equally the topic of discussion.

Mrs. Brown, a stout, motherly lady in a creaking black silk, had timed her call neatly for the second day after the arrival from the west of Miss Spellman’s widowed sister, whose husband had lived for twenty years as a missionary among the Indians, and her unusual charge.

“No, I was never in favor of bringing the child to Laurel. I strongly advised Lucy to place her at once in one of the excellent Government boarding-schools for Indian children. I understand that they are everything that could be desired for a girl in her position—clean and well-managed—the common branches thoroughly taught, together with housework and sewing.”

Miss Sophia spoke with her usual positiveness in that hard, clear-cut voice of hers, raising her white, aquiline profile a trifle against the shadowy background of her ancestral “best room.”

“Why, sister,” pleaded gentle Mrs. Waring, almost tearfully, “I could no more have left my little girl in one of those big, bare, whitewashed barracks … to eat coarse food off thick stoneware in a noisy dining-room … to sleep with fifty other girls in a dormitory where the beds almost touch … she’s not used to anything like that! I tell you, the child is as sensitive as you or I.”

“I must beg of you, Lucy, not to mention _my_ name in any such connection,” interposed her sister. “It would certainly seem that a school expressly provided for just such girls as Yellow Star—or whatever her ridiculous name is—must be the proper place for her. However, you were determined to bring her home with you, and you have had your way. It remains to be seen what will come of it… Let me fill your glass, Emmeline.”

“No, thank you, Sophia,” murmured good Mrs. Brown, hastily finishing her iced tea, and setting the thin, frosted goblet with its bits of shaved lemon peel on the silver tray at her hostess’s elbow. Sophia certainly did have a positive gift for making folks uncomfortable. “I surely do hope,” she plucked up courage to add, “that Yellow Star will do well in Laurel, and be happy with us, now that she is here.”

“We call her Stella,” faltered Mrs. Waring. “It seemed wiser …” (here Miss Sophia indulged in what might in a less aristocratic dame have been plainly called a sniff) … “wiser not to retain anything that might tend to make her needlessly conspicuous—”

“Oh, I see! ‘Stella’—that’s very pretty. I understand you are sending her to grammar school?”

“Stella will enter the eighth grade to-morrow,” Mrs. Waring answered, drawing courage from the delicate sympathy conveyed in her old friend’s soft, purring tones. “She is nearly fourteen, and I want her to be thoroughly prepared for the academy next year.”

“Why, I’m surprised! How ever did you manage it, Lucy? That’s my Doris’s grade—and Doris was fourteen last month.”

“I have taught Stella myself up to now,” her adopted mother announced with modest pride, “and a quicker or more willing pupil I never met with anywhere. Yes, I’ve talked with the superintendent; he questioned her himself; and he says she could get into the academy this fall, he thinks, but advises a year in the grades to give her more confidence and lay a better foundation.”

“Foundation for what—can any one tell me that?” Miss Sophia had been silent an unusually long time, for her. “I’m afraid my sister hasn’t considered that to educate the child above her station in life and out of sympathy with her own people will only lead to her unhappiness in the end. If you would only take my advice, Lucy, before it’s too late, and train the child for a little maid—since you will have her with you—instead of spoiling her as you do…”

“Stella is my little girl, sister,” interrupted the gentle Lucy, with the unexpected daring of some timid animal brought to bay. “She shall share whatever I have, and for as long as I live. Please remember that she hasn’t a blood relation in the world, so far as she knows, and is perfectly free to live _anywhere_. I intend to give her a good education—just as good as she can take, or as I would have given my own daughter, if I had one—and the rest is in God’s hands—and her own!”

There was a minute’s tense silence. Then Miss Sophia ostentatiously began a conversation on quite another subject with her subdued caller, who wanted nothing so much just then as to catch a glimpse of the unconscious bone of contention, but simply dared not ask in so many words to see Yellow Star.

Lucy sat back in her chair with her thin hands squeezed tightly together, trying hard to recover her composure. It was quite true that Sophia had opposed from the first her purpose to adopt and educate the child, and had yielded ungraciously enough in the end, merely because she had exhausted her weapons. There were but the two sisters left, and the homestead belonged to them equally. Mr. Waring had died the year before, leaving only the few hundred dollars that represented a missionary’s scanty savings. It was entirely natural and right that his widow should come home to live, and quite impossible for her to leave behind the waif whom she had picked up in the Indian camp some eight or nine years earlier, and had taken fully into her heart and home. Her dear husband had loved and believed in the child, just as she did. Yes, Sophia was making it very hard for her, who shrank unspeakably from anything like a contest of wills; yet the purpose with which she had come back to the old home was unshaken.

As Lucy sat there, struggling with painful thoughts and oblivious to the murmur of civil conversation, her quick eye caught a flash of white—evidently a slip of folded paper that some one had slid in the crack of the closed door. She hastily left her chair, and with her sister’s cold gray eye upon her, secured the paper and slipped out of the room with it in her hand, for it was naturally impossible to open it under that fire of suspicious and almost hostile glances. The hall was empty, and she dropped down on a haircloth covered davenport and read:

“MOTHER DEAR: I’ve done everything you said unpackt my things
put them away ironed the napkins put on a clean frock for tea
and set the table. I just _have_ to go out in the orchard and
think awhile. I wanted dreadfully to pick some flowers but Aunt
said not to and I’m not going to. If you want me for anything
you can find me in Apple-Tree Row next the Fence. I call it my
House. Your Little Girl.”

This writing of unnecessary notes was a harmless fancy of Yellow Star’s, that her foster-mother had not had the heart to correct. She had had so few playmates on the reservation—for she wasn’t allowed to play with the camp children, and it had happened that but one of the agency people had a little girl of suitable age and irreproachable propriety—that she had been really obliged to invent most of her own amusements. And then, too, Lucy had told herself that “the child couldn’t have too much practice in English.”

But the “silly trick,” as Miss Sophia called it, had already been a source of some disquiet in the ill-assorted little household of three. Perhaps she had better give the child a hint. And Sophia had contemptuously repudiated the title of “Aunt,” so naturally bestowed on the only sister of the only mother that little Yellow Star had ever known. “None of that nonsense for me,” she had declared. “_I_ haven’t adopted the child!”

“I suppose I’ll have to tell her not to say it any more … and she’ll think it so strange,” mused poor Lucy ruefully enough, foreseeing many trials for her darling, as she gathered up her nice black skirt and made her way as daintily as a cat along the box-bordered walk, past the grape arbor and the tidy kitchen garden into the grassy old apple orchard. She seldom went out-of-doors, except for church, or calling, or shopping, or on some entirely rational errand. It was perhaps the only trait of Stella’s that she vaguely disapproved—this craze to be off and into all sorts of outlandish places. Where under the canopy was she now? There was the last row of trees bending with red and yellow fruit, at the further end of the orchard, and no sign of her.

Everything was warm and sweet and very still. Only the invisible choir of crickets made silence musical, and a flaming torch of goldenrod beside the crumbling old stone wall seemed ready to light the summer’s funeral pyre. Not that Lucy Waring thought of it in just that way, but possibly Stella’s dreams and fancies might have been so translated.

Perhaps it had not been quite polite to leave the house so abruptly before their guest had taken her leave. She had forgotten … ought she to go back at once? But where could the child be? she wondered. As she stood hesitating, a low, sweet call made her look quickly up, and next instant a girlish figure swung down out of the old apple-tree and dropped lightly upon its feet.

Hair of a dense blue-black was neatly braided and tied up with red ribbon that matched the red plaid in her irreproachable gingham frock; a faint sort of underglow warmed the smooth, brown skin; a something spirited about the carriage of the well-shaped head and a singular directness in the glance of the soft, black eyes were the first things you noticed. Surely, this was no ordinary child.

“Oh, mother, mother!” she cried, impulsively throwing her arms around the little lady’s neck. “Isn’t it beautiful? Oh, I wish we had real grass and apple-trees in Dakota, don’t you? It wasn’t wrong to come out here, was it? Don’t say it was wrong, mother! Can’t this be my House to come out to when Miss Sophia doesn’t want me? I feel as if she didn’t want me; her house seems to push me right out somehow. And I’m terribly afraid of going to school; I’ve been thinking how perhaps the other girls won’t want me either.”

“You must be brave, darling,” quavered poor Mrs. Waring. “Remember, this strangeness will all wear off very soon.”

“Oh, I shall be _brave_,” burst out Yellow Star, letting her slender arms fall at her sides, and holding her jet-crowned head higher than ever. “My people have always been brave, you know—so of course I have to be! And nobody at all will ever know how afraid I am … nobody but you, mother.

“That yellow-haired girl in the pink dress that just went up the straight path to the front door … there she comes down again with the stout lady with shiny black beads all over her bonnet and her tight, black waist—she looks just like some kind of large, shining beetle, doesn’t she?—well, my heart beats so it shakes me all over when I even _think_ of going up and speaking to that girl in pink! I think she’s perfectly beautiful—and I’m terribly afraid of her—but _she’ll_ never guess how I feel. There’s one thing I have to tell you, though,” she added in a more subdued voice. “I find I can’t call Miss Sophia ‘Aunt’ any more. Do you think you’ll mind very much, mother? I’m almost certain she can’t be any real relation.”