“You speak?” asked the boy.

“Just to myself,” said Mr. Enderby.

“I speak,” said the little Indian, standing up and looking fearlessly into the superintendent’s face.  “I speak.  I keep hair, good.  I keep name Wolf-Willow, good.  I keep skin Indian color.  I not white man’s skin.  English skin no good.  My skin best, good.”

Mr. Enderby laughed.  “No, no, Little Wolf-Willow, we won’t try to change the color of your skin,” he said.

“No good try.  I keep skin, better skin than white man.  I keep skin, me.”  And the next instant he was gone.

Miss Watson, the matron, appeared at the door.  “What have you done to Little Wolf-Willow?” she asked in surprise.  “Why, he is careering down the hall at a breakneck speed.”

“I believe the child thought I was going to skin him, to make a white boy out of him,” laughed Mr. Enderby.

“Poor little chap!  I expect you wanted to cut off his hair,” said Miss Watson, “and perhaps call him Tom, Dick, Harry, or some such name.”

“I did,” answered the superintendent.  “The other boys have all come to it.”

“Yes, I know they have,” agreed Miss Watson, “but there is something about that boy that makes me think that you’ll never get his hair or his name away from him.”

And she was right.  They never did.

It was six years before Little Wolf-Willow again entered the door of his father’s tepee.  He returned to the Crooked Lakes speaking English fluently, and with the excellent appointment of interpreter for the Government Indian Agent.  The instant his father saw him, the alert Cree eye noted the uncut hair.  Nothing could have so pleased old Beaver-Tail.  He had held for years a fear in his heart that the school would utterly rob him of his boy.  Little Wolf-Willow’s mother arose from preparing an antelope stew for supper.  She looked up into her son’s face.  When he left he had not been as high as her ear tips.  With the wonderful intuition of mothers the world over, she knew at the first glance that they had not made him into a white man.  Years seemed to roll from her face.  She had been so fearful lest he should not come back to their old prairie life.

“Rest here,” she said, in the gentle Cree tongue.  “Rest here, Little Wolf-Willow; it is your home.”

The boy himself had been almost afraid to come.  He had grown accustomed to sleeping in a house, in a bed, to wearing shoes, to eating the white man’s food; but the blood of the prairies leaped in his veins at the sight of the great tepee, with its dry sod floor spread with wolf-skins and ancient buffalo hides.  He flung himself on to the furs and the grass, his fingers threading themselves through the buckskin fringes that adorned old Beaver-Tail’s leggings.

“Father,” he cried out, in the quaint Cree tongue, “father, sire of my own, I have learned the best the white man had to give, but they have not changed me, or my heart, any more than they could change the copper tint of my skin.”