“You are staying here with me, child, till we find out who you are and where you belong. Sooner or later everybody comes here, for I am Madame Corbusier, the interpreter for Colonel Gladwin. Father Le Clercq tells me how well you work. Simone will show you what to do and where to sleep. She will teach you the Plantscheman tongue, and I will teach you to remember some of your own English tongue.”

She called the girl with the red kerchief, who came in and listened gravely as if she hadn’t heard everything before.

Out in the place of pots and pans, Simone gave her a quick pinch like a cousin.

“I am white too once,” she chattered. “But now I am Puttowatomi. Puttowatomi is the grandchild of the Lenni Lenape and the language is the same. Can you understand what I say?”

“I can understand a little,” Stone Girl said. “Not all, just some, but enough.”

“Madame says your name now will be Claire,” Simone told her. “It is a good Plantscheman name like mine. For a while I thought that she would not pay Father Le Clercq the price he paid for you. The Plantscheman has no stomach except to buy at the lowest price but he has a good side, too. He doesn’t mind that you have an Indian son. The Yengwe hates the Indian but the Plantscheman marries and has children with the Indian. So you be happy now.”

STONE GIRL didn’t know what she would have done in this strange place without Simone. She taught Stone Girl to laugh at the outlandish ways of the white man; at the hard Plantscheman shoes clattering like horses over the brick floor; at the crazy stairs which the Plantschemen ran up like squirrels up a tree; at the choking smell of the small white balls that Madame Corbusier kept to ward off the evil spirit of Pitquok, the poor harmless moth, which the Plantscheman woman feared more than the wolf at the door; and at Nisku, dirt, which she feared still more than the moth, forgetting that dirt was what her mother, the Earth, was made of.

“The white people are very funny, Claire,” Simone said. “Their bones are soft like moss and that is why they must have beds of feathers. When first I came I had to lie on the floor to sleep. Now my bones are soft, too, and I can dive between my feather bags like a frog in the mud.”

Oh, Stone Girl couldn’t help but like Simone. She had the bold Indian humor. She showed Stone Girl how to dip her knees in the Plantscheman fashion when she passed the figure of a woman always standing in a corner downstairs and then to rap it with her knuckles to show it was only wood. When Père Le Clercq came to hold prayers, she caused the time on their knees to go faster by making comical Plantscheman eyes and faces with motions of scrubbing the floor. And when Stone Girl asked why did they have a china face with a tin tongue on the wall, Simone had a ready answer.