I took it from her hand, for her sake; but my enraged spirit felt more like burning the book, which afforded me no help, and was a perfect delusion to my mother.  I did not read it, but laid it unopened on the floor, where I sat on my feet.  The dim yellow light of the braided muslin burning in a small vessel of oil flickered and sizzled in the awful silent storm which followed my rejection of the Bible.

Now my wrath against the fates consumed my tears before they reached my eyes.  I sat stony, with a bowed head.  My mother threw a shawl over her head and shoulders, and stepped out into the night.

After an uncertain solitude, I was suddenly aroused by a loud cry piercing the night.  It was my mother’s voice wailing among the barren hills which held the bones of buried warriors.  She called aloud for her brothers’ spirits to support her in her helpless misery.  My fingers Grey icy cold, as I realized that my unrestrained tears had betrayed my suffering to her, and she was grieving for me.

Before she returned, though I knew she was on her way, for she had ceased her weeping, I extinguished the light, and leaned my head on the window sill.

Many schemes of running away from my surroundings hovered about in my mind.  A few more moons of such a turmoil drove me away to the eastern school.  I rode on the white man’s iron steed, thinking it would bring me back to my mother in a few winters, when I should be grown tall, and there would be congenial friends awaiting me.

VII.

Incurring my mother’s displeasure.

In the second journey to the East I had not come without some precautions.  I had a secret interview with one of our best medicine men, and when I left his wigwam I carried securely in my sleeve a tiny bunch of magic roots.  This possession assured me of friends wherever I should go.  So absolutely did I believe in its charms that I wore it through all the school routine for more than a year.  Then, before I lost my faith in the dead roots, I lost the little buckskin bag containing all my good luck.

At the close of this second term of three years I was the proud owner of my first diploma.  The following autumn I ventured upon a college career against my mother’s will.

I had written for her approval, but in her reply I found no encouragement.  She called my notice to her neighbors’ children, who had completed their education in three years.  They had returned to their homes, and were then talking English with the frontier settlers.  Her few words hinted that I had better give up my slow attempt to learn the white man’s ways, and be content to roam over the prairies and find my living upon wild roots.  I silenced her by deliberate disobedience.

Thus, homeless and heavy-hearted, I began anew my life among strangers.

As I hid myself in my little room in the college dormitory, away from the scornful and yet curious eyes of the students, I pined for sympathy.  Often I wept in secret, wishing I had gone West, to be nourished by my mother’s love, instead of remaining among a cold race whose hearts were frozen hard with prejudice.