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Updated: May 13, 2025
When Long Hand comes, what will Mitiahwe say to him?" Mitiahwe's eyes were determined, her face was set, she flushed deeply, then the color fled. "What my mother would say, I will say. Shall the white man's Medicine fail? If I wish it, then it will be so; and I will say so." "But if the white man's Medicine fail?" Swift Wing made a gesture toward the door where the horseshoe hung.
"Mitiahwe is young, her body is warm, her eyes are bright, the songs she sings, her tongue if these keep him not, and the Voice calls him still to go, then still Mitiahwe shall whisper, and tell him " "Hai-yo hush," said the girl, and trembled a little, and put both hands on her mother's mouth.
His eyes glistened, and a red spot came to each cheek as he leaned forward. At his last word Dingan, who had been standing abstractedly listening as it were, swung round on him with a muttered oath, and the skin of his face appeared to tighten. Watching through the crack of the door, Mitiahwe saw the look she knew well, though it had never been turned on her, and her heart beat faster.
"Hai-yai!" she said with plaintive smiling, ran to a corner of the lodge, and from a leather bag drew forth a horseshoe and looked at it, murmuring to herself. The old woman gazed at her wonderingly. "What is it, Mitiahwe?" she asked. "It is good-luck. So my man has said. It is the way of his people.
Instinctively they knew that he brought news, that something had happened; yet Mitiahwe felt at her belt for what no Indian girl would be without; and this one was a gift from her man on the anniversary of the day she first came to his lodge.
Breaking Rock stood for a moment looking toward the lodge, then came slowly forward to them. Never in all the four years had he approached this lodge of Mitiahwe, who, the daughter of a chief, should have married himself, the son of a chief! Slowly, but with long, slouching stride, Breaking Rock came nearer. The two women watched him without speaking.
There it was, the thing which called them back, the bright-eyed children with the colour of the brown prairie in their faces, and their brains so sharp and strong. But here was no child to call Dingan back, only the eloquent, brave, sweet face of Mitiahwe.... If he went! Would he go? Was he going? And now that Mitiahwe had been told that he would go, what would she do?
She assumed that Dingan would leave Mitiahwe, for he would hear the voices of his people calling far away, even as the red man who went East into the great cities heard the prairies and the mountains and the rivers and his own people calling, and came back, and put off the clothes of civilisation, and donned his buckskins again, and sat in the Medicine Man's tent, and heard the spirits speak to him through the mist and smoke of the sacred fire.
The old woman sat silent, clasping the hands of her daughter firmly, and looking out of the wide doorway toward the trees that fringed the river; and presently, as she looked, her face changed and grew pinched all at once, and Mitiahwe, looking at her, turned a startled face toward the river also. "Breaking Rock!" she said, in alarm, and got to her feet quickly.
But at last Dingan had broken through this custom, and insisted that Swift Wing should be with her daughter when he was away from home, as now on this wonderful autumn morning, when Mitiahwe had been singing to the Sun, to which she prayed for her man and for everlasting days with him.
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