Read Ebook: Yellow Star: A Story of East and West by Eastman Elaine Goodale Dietz Lone Star Illustrator Henook Makhewe Kelenaka Illustrator

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A GIRLISH FIGURE SWUNG DOWN OUT OF THE OLD APPLE-TREE AND DROPPED LIGHTLY UPON ITS FEET PAGE 16

HE WAS QUIET, EVEN FOR AN INDIAN BABY; UNNATURALLY QUIET, SHE THOUGHT " 88

"I WAS ONLY DIGGING MEDICINE," THE ELF SOBERLY ANNOUNCED " 209

YELLOW STAR

YELLOW STAR

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!"

"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."

"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 ..." ... "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..."

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:

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."

"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."

THE GIRL FROM DAKOTA

Lucy Waring had no warriors' blood that she knew of to fall back upon, so perhaps it was partly her long association with the stoics of the plains that made it possible for her to turn over her little girl to the "new teacher," the very next day, with the stiff smile of her New England forebears under social duress--to drag her eyes away from the wild, despairing courage of Yellow Star's great black ones--to walk quite steadily out of the door and down the long flight of wooden steps and along the drowsy village street, without even a backward look to share or soften the imaginary terrors of School.

These took no worse form, just at first, than the curious but not unfriendly stares of forty-two pairs of critical young eyes, and the penetrating susurrus of forty-two edged voices, all of which the Indian girl felt with a pricking and tingling anguish in every fiber of her sensitive body, as she sat rigid in a front seat, directly facing the teacher's desk.

Then the second bell rang, and there was a hush. As soon as she could, after opening exercises, Miss Morrison supplied the new pupil with pen and ink and the usual blank for the school record. It looked something like this:

Your name in full. Date of birth. Year, month and day. Name of father. Father's occupation. School previously attended. What grade were you in?

A wild glance down the length of the paper made it certain that her worst fears had been promptly realized, and poor Stella, after setting down her new name, Stella Waring, sat staring at the other five questions, fairly tense with nervous dread, until her busy teacher had found time to note the situation. Then she bent over the girl from Dakota and asked very kindly, in a low voice:

"Why don't you put down your age and your father's name, Stella?"

"I do not know my date of birth, year, month and day; I do not know my father's name and occupation, and I never went to school before," she replied in tones sharpened by fright, so that they rang through the crowded school-room, causing an audible gasp of astonishment.

"Why, I was certainly told that you belonged here," wondered Miss Morrison; then, with ready tact divining something of the girl's embarrassment:

"Never mind about the questions just now. This is our lesson for to-day; look it over, please, and be prepared to stand and read when I call upon you."

This Stella could do, and knew she could. Abundant time was given to recover herself; then the paragraph assigned was read, if somewhat slowly and with the faintest trace of foreign accent, yet distinctly, and with more delicacy of modulation than perhaps any other in that room could command.

"Very good, indeed," approved Miss Morrison; and this time the slight buzz sounded almost like encouragement, and the pricking and tingling were less agonizing than before.

When the others passed out at recess, Stella remained in her seat at a sign from the teacher, who sat down beside her and bent her violet-scented brown head sympathetically toward her singular but far from unattractive new pupil.

"About the age, dear," she began, tentatively, "surely you must know..."

Here the clear voice got somehow muffled, and the warm-hearted teacher hastily assured her that it didn't matter one bit about the questions--she had had no idea--and impulsively she took the hated paper out of the little girl's sensitive brown hand.

It might have been as well if Lucy Waring had explained matters somewhat before her abrupt departure; but the truth was that she had strung her difficult courage to the necessary point of leaving the child to her own resources in this strange, and possibly unfriendly, new environment. The effort had carried her to a really unnecessary extreme; she had forgotten that Yellow Star's personal history was as yet quite unknown in Laurel.

Miss Morrison felt the incident to be a touching one. She even reproached herself for thoughtless adherence to routine, and during the rest of the morning gave a quite unusual degree of attention to her new charge. It appeared that Stella had the correct eye and delicate hand of her race; she was an excellent penman; she had been well drilled in the essentials. More: she was eager, alert, intense--quick to spring upon an idea as a cat upon its prey.

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