"Oh, yes; that and many other things. Two years she was at Carlisle without coming back. Her mother was very poor--living in a brush-house that summer, as always, renting her own adobe for the season that she might have something for the winter. Adriana cried all the time. The next year she did not come back, nor the next. When it was time for school to be over, she wrote that she would stay in Philadelphia. Then her mother died--of sorrow."
"Who can tell that? No one knows. She has not written."
"Well, there is Dionysio, who will fetch you the wood to-day. He can tell you what he thinks of the Indian school at Carlisle."
Mr. Page had become interested, Walter and Nellie equally so. When the wood arrived they found the driver of the wagon an intelligent-looking youth about the age of Arturo, perhaps a little older.
"They tell me you have been a student at Carlisle," said Mr. Page after he had paid him.
"Yes, sir. I spent four years there," replied the boy, very politely.
"Of what benefit has it been to you?" inquired Mr. Page.
"No benefit, that I can see," was the reply.
"At first--yes; but not now. I am satisfied."
"Laboring work--harvesting, ploughing, grape picking--any thing that I can do."
"What advantage, then, is your having been at Carlisle?"
"None. There they teach us many things, but seldom can an Indian get work in the large cities. A white man is always given the first chance; that is natural. I learned wood-carving. Perhaps if I went far away and waited long I might have been able to work at my trade; but my old grandfather and grandmother were alone here with my little sister. How could I stay away from them? So here I am, and here I will stay. It is my home; I like it best."
"It is well that you look at it in that way if it must be so. It appears to me there are hundreds of thousands uselessly spent in the Indian schools every year."
"That is very true," said the young man. "How much better to have them on the reservations, where are all the people together, where all could help each other and learn from each other. What a fertile soil is this, for instance. How much could be done here! There are many places like this. But now--it is a bad job, a very bad job."