“They threw the mother’s body into the great pit with more than a hundred others; but a kind woman of the camp took the baby home and fed and took care of it. That baby was me!
“That is why I do not know who my father and mother were, or whether I have a single relation in this world. There is no way to find out, for nearly all my father’s band were killed by the soldiers on that day, and there were many babies who died, and no one knows who I am. And that is why the old women called me The-One-who-was-left-Alive!”
That was all. A very simple little story, very quietly told; but somehow no one who heard it had much to say. With one accord they all got up from the mossy log and set out for home. Presently they began to talk again about other things, and even to laugh as lightly as before. Just as they parted, Ethan slipped into Yellow Star’s hand the thing he had shaped with his knife from a splinter of pine while she told her story. It was a little, five-pointed star.
“For the land sakes!” exclaimed Grandma Brown, knitting faster and faster, as was her wont when disturbed in mind. “Why don’t that Parker girl’s mother let her dresses down, I want to know? ’Pears to me her legs get longer an’ longer every day! I see her tearin’ down the hill a spell ago, with that outlandish dog o’ hers in full chase, and all I could think of was a hen-turkey with its wings spread out, tryin’ to get away from a fox.”
“Why, mother! Cynthia is only a little girl,” observed Doris’ mother, in quiet amusement.
“Same age as our Doris, ain’t she? When I was young, gals was women at fourteen, an’ expected to quit playin’ with the boys, wear their dresses to their shoe-tops an’ be pretty-behaved.”
“I wish mother’d let me wear _my_ dresses to the tops of my shoes,” put in Doris, demurely. “I’m three months older than Cynthia, anyway.” She had opened the sitting-room door just in time to hear the last speech, but was careful not to commit herself to the rest of her grandma’s program.
“You all going out to your uncle’s place again to-day, Doris?” asked her mother, indulgently. “I see Cynthia’s here, but where are the others?”
“Oh, Stella had her Saturday work to do, and couldn’t get ’round before two o’clock, she said. It’s most that, now,” and she turned again to the window. No one was in sight except Cynthia and Scotty, who were joyously running races up and down the yard.