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Whaley?" she cried softly. "I don't know what I think. Probably nothing to it. But there's a locket. We know that. With a picture that looks like you, Lemoine here thinks. We'd better find out whose picture it is, hadn't we?" "Yes, but Do you mean that maybe it has something to do with me? How can it? The sister of Stokimatis was my mother. Onistah is my cousin. Ask Stokimatis. She knows.
"When I was a baby my own mother died. Stokimatis is her sister. I do not know who my father was, but I have heard he was an American. Stokimatis took me to her tepee and I lived there with her and Onistah till I was five or six. Then Angus McRae saw me one day. He liked me, so he bought me for three yards of tobacco, a looking-glass, and five wolf pelts."
"When he wants to make you one, Mr. McRae pays you a great compliment" The girl flashed a look of gratitude at him and went on with her story. "Whenever we are near Stokimatis, I go to see her. She has always been very fond of me. It wasn't really for money she sold me, but because she knew Angus McRae could bring me up better than she could.
But he guarded the expression of it as though it were a vice. "Maybe Onistah has heard his mother say something about it," Jessie suggested. "Like enough. There'll be nae harm in askin' the lad." But the Blackfoot had little to tell. He had been told by Stokimatis that Sleeping Dawn was his cousin, but he had never quite believed it.
The Indian woman had recently lost her own child. She hid the babe and afterward was permitted to adopt it. When a few months later she died of smallpox, Stokimatis had inherited the care of the little one. She had named it Sleeping Dawn. Later, when the famine year came, she had sold the child to Angus McRae. That was all she knew. But it was enough for Jessie.
Jessie opened, to let in Onistah and his mother. Stokimatis and the girl gravitated into each other's arms, as is the way with women who are fond of each other. The Indian is stolid, but Jessie had the habit of impetuosity, of letting her feelings sweep her into demonstration. Even the native women she loved were not proof against it. McRae questioned Stokimatis.
All we've learned is that I look like a picture of a white woman found in a locket nearly twenty years ago. That doesn't take us very far, does it?" "Well, Stokimatis may know something. When Onistah comes back with her, we'll get the facts straight." McRae came into the room. "News, lass," he cried, and his voice rang. "A Cree runner's just down frae Northern Lights.
For any expression of it seemed like a reproach to Matapi-Koma and Onistah and Stokimatis, to her brother Fergus and in a sense even to her father. None the less her blood beat fast. What she had just found out meant that she could aspire to the civilization of the whites, that she had before her an outlook, was not to be hampered by the limitations imposed upon her by race.
Once, when he had pressed his mother with questions, she had smiled deeply and changed the subject. His feeling was, and had always been, that there was some mystery about the girl's birth. Stokimatis either knew what it was or had some hint of it. His testimony at least tended to support the wild hopes flaming in the girl's heart. Lemoine started south for Whoop-Up at break of day.
What could this woman of the picture be to me?" Jessie could not understand the fluttering pulse in her throat. She had not doubted that her mother was a Blackfoot. All the romance of her clouded birth centered around the unknown father who had died when she was a baby. Stokimatis had not been very clear about that. She had never met the man, according to the story she had told Sleeping Dawn.
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