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YELLOW STAR
[Illustration: “I seem to be just in time, again, Stella,” was all he
said.
FRONTISPIECE. _See page 265._]
YELLOW STAR
A STORY OF EAST AND WEST
BY
ELAINE GOODALE EASTMAN
Author of “Wigwam Evenings,” “Little
Brother o’ Dreams,” Etc.
_With Illustrations by_
ANGEL DE CORA
AND
WILLIAM LONE STAR
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1911
_Copyright, 1911_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved_
Published, September, 1911
_Electrotyped and Printed by
THE COLONIAL PRESS
C. H. Simonds & Co., Boston, U.S.A._
TO WINONA.
(MOUNT HOLYOKE, 1914.)
Dark eyes, that drew their mingled fires
From native kings, and Pilgrim sires,
And fused within one glowing breast
The ardors of the East and West,—
Child of the prairie’s generous sweep,
Your tryst with grave Minerva keep,
Yet first on Wisdom’s roll you’ll find
The sacred love of humankind!
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. LAUREL FOLKS 3
II. THE GIRL FROM DAKOTA 20
III. A LESSON IN HISTORY 33
IV. THE-ONE-WHO-WAS-LEFT-ALIVE 46
V. IN WOLCOTT’S WOODS 63
VI. A WILD WEST PERFORMANCE 76
VII. BEHIND THE SCENES 88
VIII. THE RIGHT STUFF 99
IX. GLIMPSES OF OLD AMERICA 112
X. NOBODY’S LITTLE GIRL 130
XI. JUST FRIENDS 146
XII. HERBS AND SIMPLES 159
XIII. INDIAN HOSPITALITY 176
XIV. AN END AND A BEGINNING 193
XV. THE SCENE SHIFTS 207
XVI. BY RETURN OF POST 222
XVII. “PRAY FOR MY PEOPLE WHEN THE SUN GOES DOWN” 238
XVIII. FACING THE SUNRISE 255
ILLUSTRATIONS
“I SEEM TO BE JUST IN TIME, AGAIN, STELLA,”
WAS ALL HE SAID _Frontispiece_
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
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.
[Illustration: A girlish figure swung down out of the old apple-tree and
dropped lightly upon its feet. _Page 16._]
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.”