“They have done many bad things,” she agreed.

“Guka, Mamma. Aren’t you glad the white sister who spits in our faces is scalped and can’t say bad things to us any more?”

Stone Girl held herself with difficulty.

“Otter Boy. I think perhaps she will never say bad things to you again.”

“Guka, Mamma. Will our Indian brothers come and burn our stable, too, so we have no place to sleep?”

“They will come, I think,” his mother answered, and turned away to the inn. The doors were unlocked and she went in. From the parlor wall she took down the painting of the lady with yellow hair, carried it swiftly to the woods, where she hid it in a clump of young hemlock.

“Now it is in the hand of Getanitowit,” she told Otter Boy.

It was almost unbearable waiting. The sun rose red over the blackened wheatfields. It seemed odd to hear the crows call this day like always from the edge of the woods. There followed a great silence in the valley. Between watches the girl got the child and herself snatches of breakfast from what food remained. Afterward the pair stood for a while motionless on the road in front of the inn. But no one came. The valley lay like a dead thing, soundless, unstirring. Never before had it slept like this in the daytime. It was like the hush before the thunder. Any moment now, Stone Girl felt, violence must break out. But nothing happened. In the end she set their faces down the road to the stone house by the run where the preacher lived. Only a month ago she had seen the woods around this house white with Taquach, the dogwood, and before that with the pretty white star flowers of Schwanaminek, the shad tree. Now the limestone walls stood blackened and ruined, the roof gone. Faint smoke still rose from within.

Staring at it, Stone Girl remembered the stories in her home village. Old men would sit peacefully smoking in front of their cabins and tell of burning a house like this. It was the wickedness of the white vandal that had brought it on him. He had taken possession of Indian land as if the Great Spirit had given it to him. He had destroyed the trees, cut them down not for winter warmth but to pile and burn in huge wanton fires so that the smoke drove the game away in the forest. Not satisfied, he had turned up even the sacred Indian earth with his ground cutter and crusher. For a while the Indian had endured him, hoping he would get tired and go away. In the end he found the only way to get rid of the white plunderer was to destroy him and the work of his hands. He had lain in the forest watching and hating the white profaner, then early in the morning descended on him! Ehih! What a difference now. He who had been so bold and shameless begged like a woman for his life. The Indian teller of tales would hold his pipe from his mouth and mimic the fearful faces, the useless prayers to the white man’s gods. The villagers had heard the story many times. They stood around waiting for the happy ending, that the white man had paid for his crimes with blood and scalps and with burned houses and crops for the burning of the Indian forest.