“They’s nobody left on our farms now,” he mourned. “Nobody but Injuns.”

The two watchers waited on the bank while the convoy passed. They stood almost motionless till the last straggler had vanished downstream.

“Guka, Mamma,” Otter Boy said. “The white man comes. But he goes, too. He scares and runs away. He is not like the brave Indian.”

“NOW they are gone,” Otter Boy said that night when they went to bed. “Tomorrow you can be with me.”

But hardly had the first streaks of daylight appeared when unaccustomed sharp sounds rose from the other end of the valley. They came again and again, barking short and quick, sometimes once, sometimes twice, sometimes many close together.

“Guka, Mamma, what do we hear?” Otter Boy asked. “Is it a dog?”

“No, it is not a dog,” Stone Girl said.

“Is it thunder?”

“Otter Boy, I think it is not thunder.”

Stone Girl got up and Otter Boy followed. When they reached the stable yard they could see black smoke rising in columns down the valley.

“Guka, Mamma. I spoke right. It was thunder. I can see where the forked tongue licked at the trees.”

“Otter Boy. It was not the forked tongue, I think, but our Indian brothers who are here.”

“Guka, Mamma—”

“Sehe, hush,” she told him. “Someone comes and he is not Indian.”

From the woods beyond the field they could hear a thrashing. Presently a figure burst out of the brush and trees, a white man with a half-filled sack and nothing more except the clothes on his back. Stone Girl remembered seeing his face several times around the stable but never had he turned on her such a look of hate and terror as he ran on toward the river.

“Guka, Mamma. Why did he look at us like that?” Otter Boy asked.

“It is the white man’s look at the Indian,” she told him.

“Guka, Mamma. What did our Indian brothers do to him that he ran?”

“There are many things they do,” she told him. “It is to rid the white man from their land.”

For a time they stood staring at the rising columns of smoke.

“Guka, Mamma. Are our Indian brothers cold? Do they burn the white man’s house to get warm?”

“Otter Boy. Our brothers are not cold. They burn the houses and crops so the land can go back to the Indian forest and game.”

“Do they burn the stone house of the preacher, too?”

Stone Girl felt a chill.

“Otter Boy. They don’t burn the stone house. Only the roof and what is inside.”

The boy looked up at her face quickly as if he detected something in her voice.

“Guka, Mamma. Isn’t it good our people have come and that we are Kitchi Kitchi, victorious?”

“It is good,” she told him.

“Don’t the white people deserve to die for all the bad things they have done to us?”