“Hast thou never seen Mrs. Karricher looking at Mary with a kind of worship?” his mother inquired.

“Why do you ask that?” Peter Stanton came back sharply. “Mrs. Karricher has every right to, Mother. It’s perfectly natural for her. She raised Mary as her own child before bringing her to me. But this Indian girl’s worship of Nan is purely primitive, the blind admiration of a savage for a white child.”

“Dost thou think so?” the old lady said.

“What else could it be?” he demanded. “It’s unaccountable and unnatural any other way. In any event, it may be our salvation. I thought perhaps, Mother, when you went back to Philadelphia you might take Nan with you for a visit as you did Mary when she was a child. Once Nan’s gone, we have a notion our dusky Indian maiden will take her own child and fade into the forest and that’s the last we’ll see of her.”

Mrs. Stanton’s face had sobered.

“I must think it over, Son,” she said. “It was nearly fifteen years ago when Mary visited me. I am older now and thou’st just admitted that thy child does not make the sweetest of companions.”

FOR some time sleep had not come easily to Stone Girl. It must be the strange sleeping place, she told herself, or the bed she lay on. The beds in Madame Corbusier’s house had been young and strong. This bed was old and very weak. Many people had lain on it. The cover had long since been worn through, so that the corn husks pushed out like the insides of a gutted deer. Also, it was a narrow bed. She and Otter Boy had to lie very close or one would fall off. It was not a flat bed. At the place for their heads, the bed rose up like a boulder. She thought she knew now why white people seldom stood straight as Indians. They had slept on such a bed and it had bent them like ice bends the young birch trees.

Beneath her she could hear the horses stamp. They sneezed from the hay dust and pulled on their mangers with their strong teeth. The couch and blanket smelled rank of them. Once during the night, when a rat ran over their legs, Otter Boy whispered.

“Guka, Mamma, why do you shake? Is it the rat?”

“No, it is not the rat.”

“Is it the cold of the night?”

“Otter Boy, it is not the cold. Our uncle, Sisquanachan, the south wind, is with us.”

“Guka, Mamma, is it Kamlus, the sickness that shakes again and again?”

“Otter Boy. Go into sleep. It is not Kamlus, the sickness that shakes again and again.”

“Guka, Mamma, do you know the old dried-up white woman who came yesterday? The one that looks like she will not breathe very long.”

“I do not know her. I only wait on her at the table.”