Not so the children. Rugged with health, bubbling over with happiness, and almost as brown as the young Indians, they deplored the necessity of leaving a spot with which they had become thoroughly familiar, and whose strange, peculiar people they had learned to know and love. The Indians are slow to make friends among the whites, but their confidence once given, they do not soon withdraw it. Walter and Nellie had long since been initiated into the mysteries of herb gathering, fruit drying, blanket and basket weaving, rug making and beef jerking. They could talk quite intelligently on all these subjects.
That which interested them most, appealing strongly to their tender sympathies, was the subject of the removal of the Indians from the Springs.
"They talk of it everywhere we go," said the boy to his father one evening. "They are always asking us if we think perhaps the government will let them stay, papa, and what _you_ think of it.
"We always tell them that it isn't the government that is putting them out, but they can't understand that. They say if the government can buy them or give them another home they might just as well let them stay. I think it is dreadful, dreadful for the people to drive them away."
"Yes, it is both sad and unjust, it seems to me," said their father; "but such has been the fate of the Indian ever since the white man landed on these shores. It has always been 'move on, move on'----"
"Till there isn't any more land to move to," interrupted Walter.
"There is going to be a _Junta_ to-morrow or the day after," said Nellie. "The commissioners are coming to talk to them."
"A good many of them think they won't have to go, because Mr. Lummis is coming, papa," said Walter.
"That will not make any difference in one way," said their father, "though it may in another. Mr. Lummis is a true friend of the Indians. He will exert all his efforts to have them removed to a desirable place, where there will be plenty of water, fertile soil, and every other favorable condition."
"I heard a man say the other day to Captain Blacktooth that the Indians had not been here more than twenty-five years."
"He said, pointing to the graveyard: 'Look at our graves on the hillside. Some of those crosses crumble like ashes. Touch one, it falls to pieces in your hand. And yet there are crosses there fifty years old that have not begun to crumble or fall.'"