round and round the stove, crying aloud for help.  But my mother and the woman seemed not to know my danger.  They sat still, looking quietly upon the devil’s chase after me.  At last I grew dizzy.  My head revolved as on a hidden pivot.  My knees became numb, and doubled under my weight like a pair of knife blades without a spring.  Beside my mother’s chair I fell in a heap.  Just as the devil stooped over me with outstretched claws my mother awoke from her quiet indifference, and lifted me on her lap.  Whereupon the devil vanished, and I was awake.

On the following morning I took my revenge upon the devil.  Stealing into the room where a wall of shelves was filled with books, I drew forth The Stories of the Bible.  With a broken slate pencil I carried in my apron pocket, I began by scratching out his wicked eyes.  A few moments later, when I was ready to leave the room, there was a ragged hole in the page where the picture of the devil had once been.

V.

IRON ROUTINE

A loud-clamoring bell awakened us at half-past six in the cold winter mornings.  From happy dreams of Western rolling lands and unlassoed freedom we tumbled out upon chilly bare floors back again into a paleface day.  We had short time to jump into our shoes and clothes, and wet our eyes with icy water, before a small hand bell was vigorously rung for roll call.

There were too many drowsy children and too numerous orders for the day to waste a moment in any apology to nature for giving her children such a shock in the early morning.  We rushed downstairs, bounding over two high steps at a time, to land in the assembly room.

A paleface woman, with a yellow-covered roll book open on her arm and a gnawed pencil in her hand, appeared at the door.  Her small, tired face was coldly lighted with a pair of large gray eyes.

She stood still in a halo of authority, while over the rim of her spectacles her eyes pried nervously about the room.  Having glanced at her long list of names and called out the first one, she tossed up her chin and peered through the crystals of her spectacles to make sure of the answer “Here.”

Relentlessly her pencil black-marked our daily records if we were not present to respond to our names, and no chum of ours had done it successfully for us.  No matter if a dull headache or the painful cough of slow consumption had delayed the absentee, there was only time enough to mark the tardiness.  It was next to impossible to leave the iron routine after the civilizing machine had once begun its day’s buzzing; and as it was inbred in me to suffer in silence rather than to appeal to the ears of one whose open eyes could not see my pain, I have many times trudged in the day’s harness heavy-footed, like a dumb sick brute.

Once I lost a dear classmate.  I remember well how she used to mope along at my side, until one morning she could not raise her head from her pillow.  At her deathbed I stood weeping, as the paleface woman sat near her moistening the dry lips.  Among the folds of the bedclothes I saw the open pages of the white man’s Bible.  The dying Indian girl talked disconnectedly of Jesus the Christ and the paleface who was cooling her swollen hands and feet.