Otter Boy had been sitting on the floor drinking in the good Indian words. Now he asked Simone for another story and she told him her favorite.

“A long time ago a Puttowatomi girl was born in the beech forest,” she began. “Her mother looked up and saw a small girl in the village playing with her father’s war paint, so she called her baby Red Girl. It was a powerful name and when Red Girl grew up she was shapely and strong with the red color always in her cheeks. Many Puttowatomi young men tried to talk to her but she would talk to only one and after that they were always seen together. But one day he went to war and never came back, and now all the color began to fade out of Red Girl’s cheeks. She would scarcely eat or speak and at last He Who Is Above All looked down and saw her. Where are those pretty red cheeks I liked? he asked. Something must be done. So he changed her into a bird to fly to her missing lover in the Joyous Land That Is Beyond Our Sight. But she still looked pale to the Great Spirit. How would her lover know her? So he took the red that used to be on her cheeks and put it on her breast. Then she flew away to the distant region, promising her friends not to stay but to come back in the spring. And every year when the ice goes out of the river, she keeps her promise. You can see her red breast and hear her telling her friends that she is back.”

Of late this story had made Stone Girl sad. She would sit very quiet thinking of Espan and pondering why he had never come for her. Surely Smashed Head would have told him to what village of the Northward Indians he had taken her, and surely the Northward Indians would have told Espan when he got there that Black Robe had taken her across the Great Sweet Water. It was a very long way, to be sure, but that would be nothing for Espan, who had legs like wings and traveled a long way each year to fight the Long Knives.

Always Simone would see Stone Girl’s sadness and try to cheer her.

“Stone Girl. In my mind I see someone coming,” she predicted. “It is a man. He will not even knock. Madame Corbusier’s front door will open. You will look up and it will be Espan.”

But the Month of the Tree Whose Branches Are Pounded for Baskets passed. The Plantschemen plowed their fields again and dug their gardens. Flowers bloomed once more on the Plantscheman fruit trees and bushes. The Month That Brings the Summer passed and the Month When the Deer Turns Red.

“Perhaps,” Simone tried to cheer her, “the great white captain still camps along the Muskingum and Espan can’t come till he goes.”

But Stone Girl felt in her heart it was not true. The white captain long since must have gone back to the Quekel province. She watched the Month When the Deer Turns Gray pass into the Month of Cool Nights and now the plants in Madame Corbusier’s garden began to wither from the first frost.