The traditional Thanksgiving dinner was a ceremony never omitted at the Spellman homestead, even though there had been years when Miss Sophia had eaten it quite alone, with a determination rather grim than grateful. This year, there were the two elderly sisters, alone in their generation, yet with little in common save their family history and childhood memories, and the little maid from sun-steeped plains of far-off Dakota who sat sedately between them, plying her knife and fork with a decorum that even Miss Sophia could not gainsay. Now and again her black eyes darted keenly from one subdued face to the other, as if in search of something; a “trick,” Miss Sophia said, that made her “as nervous as a witch!”

The long, heavy, and, to tell the truth, rather silent and oppressive meal had come to an end at last, with pumpkin pie and Indian pudding made punctiliously after the old family recipes, and a mold of “quaking jelly,” that had been a favorite of Lucy’s from childhood. After the black coffee was brought in, Stella slid her nuts and raisins into her pocket, and rose at a nod from her foster-mother.

“Mrs. Maloney will wash the dishes to-day, dear,” she said. “You may go out now, or do anything you like for the rest of the day. And I think I hear Cynthia’s whistle,” she added, indulgently.

Miss Sophia sighed aggressively. That clear, boyish whistle was a fresh offense in her ears.

“Go out by the side door, Stella; and, whatever you do, don’t let in that dog with his great, muddy feet!” she commanded; sure that, if Cynthia were coming, Scotty could not be far off.

“Come on down to Doris’ house,” burst out Sin, before the door was fairly open. “It’s always lots of fun down there; her mother lets us crack nuts and pop corn and everything. Mother has a headache again and I mustn’t make any noise around home, and of course it’s solemn as a church here—’t always is. Can’t you come, Jibby?” she begged, anxiously.

(The new name was short for “Ojibway,” invented to tease the little Sioux girl, but Yellow Star accepted it, as she did most things, with quite stoical composure.)

“Yes, I can, Sin; I can do anything I want all the rest of to-day,” she answered, gravely. “But oh! do let’s go to the woods!”

“All right; put on your things quick, and come along! (Down, Scotty! down, sir!) We must stop for Doris, though; and I think Miss Morrison’s there to dinner to-day.”

Stella’s night-black eyes glowed at this, for she silently worshiped her sympathetic teacher.

Arrived at the Doctor’s, they found a large and merry party gathered around the air-tight stove in the shabby parlor, listening with enthusiasm to the warbling of operatic stars on the new phonograph, followed by a “piece” on the piano by demure Doris. There were Grandpa and Grandma Brown, a brisk and well-preserved old couple, with cheeks like rosy winter apples; Uncle Si Wolcott, Mrs. Brown’s eccentric bachelor brother, who lived all alone in a white farmhouse on the “Bay road,” Doris and her father and mother, and, finally, two guests who were not “kin” to any one else present.

One was Miss Morrison, whose home was in an up-to-date little city in a neighboring State, and who must otherwise have eaten her Thanksgiving dinner rather forlornly in a boarding-house; the other, a lanky boy of sixteen or so, who wore glasses and a thoughtful air, had created some amusement for the giggling girls at the academy by his name, which was Honey. When thus appealed to in the velvet tones of some “lady teacher,” the girls seemed to think it funny. His “front name” was Ethan, and he was an orphan with his own way to make, his nearest relative a none too loving “aunt by marriage,” which explains his appearance on the day of family reunions at Mother Brown’s hospitable table.

The present was not, as Grandpa Brown had more than once remarked with apparently a distinct sense of personal injury, a “genoowine old-fashioned Thanksgivin’.” Far from affording the excellent sleighing which had been expected to facilitate family gatherings in Grandpa’s day, and the coasting that had undoubtedly sharpened the youngsters’ appetites for “turkey an’ fixin’s,” an unseasonable Indian summer warmth pervaded this particular twenty-seventh of November. When the young people set out on their walk, Ethan Honey and Miss Morrison being included, they found the country roads soft underfoot, rusty green leaves yet clinging to the wide-spreading apple boughs, with here and there a frost-bitten apple, and even the yellow of ripe corn still nestling in some of the brown stooks that dotted the fields like tattered and smoke-stained wigwams. Red alder berries and gray clematis fringes and the “ghosts of the goldenrod” adorned the wayside, while the purple-brown woodlands melted into a nameless haze upon the lonely horizon line.

“I’m fond of cross-country hikes, aren’t you?” Ethan observed, as he turned to offer Stella an informal lift over the low stone wall that lay between them and a short cut to “Wolcott’s Woods.”

“I do not know that word ‘hikes,’” she answered, in her slow, careful English, “but if it is anything like to-day, I am sure I shall like it very much. I never really knew about Thanksgiving before.”

“Oh, didn’t you?” asked the boy, trying not to stare at his self-possessed little companion, whose cadenced voice and quaint ways, as well as her unusual appearance, might have given him some excuse. “I suppose of course your people don’t keep Thanksgiving,” he added, awkwardly.

“Father and Mother Waring always had the good dinner and the church service,” Stella answered, “but somehow I never understood about the family part. I suppose because I was only a little girl then; or else because they don’t have families out in Dakota! I mean, there are so many lonely ones whose families are back east, with the old houses and the old names and all the old things,” the girl persisted, greatly to Ethan’s secret amusement at her unexpected point of view.

“But, Stella—that is your name, isn’t it?” he began.

“It is one of my names,” she replied with dignity. But just then Scotty dashed between them, nearly upsetting both, while Sin followed with scarcely less of abandon, shrieking “A woodchuck! A woodchuck!” at the top of her voice.

“I wouldn’t go any nearer if I were you, Cynthia,” advised Ethan gravely, while Doris and her teacher, calling out futile appeals to “be careful,” lagged breathless in the rear.

“It’s nothing but a horrid old skunk,” Cynthia presently complained, coming back quite crestfallen. “Will you never learn anything, you old dunderhead?” This to the sheepish Sir Walter, whom she had by his collar and the hair of his head.

“When you’ve skinned as many as I have, you won’t be liable to make any mistake,” the boy observed; whereat Doris shuddered visibly.

“You know,” she informed the others, “Ethan skins everything he can get hold of—and cuts them up, too, as often as not—cats and dogs and rabbits and frogs—ugh! He calls it ‘studying biology,’—isn’t it perfectly dreadful?”

“Ethan will probably be a great scientist, some day,” suggested Miss Morrison.

“He’s going to be a doctor, he says,” Cynthia bluntly objected, causing the boy to blush uncomfortably, while Stella regarded him with new respect.

To change the subject, he said something about prairie-dogs, and the girl from Dakota was called upon for an offhand description of these interesting animals, which she gave soberly enough, though making the others laugh with her quaint characterizations and clever mimicry.

Having crossed several fields and followed a farm lane to its end, Ethan let down a “pair o’ bars,” and the company climbed a rocky pasture knoll, where Yellow Star’s quick eye caught something gleaming like dull fire among the dead brown of the bare bushes.

“What is that? It is like a sunset!” she exclaimed, and Cynthia echoed her.

“Oh, what is it? Oh, how beautiful!”

“Bitter-sweet, and the finest I ever saw!” declared Miss Morrison, with enthusiasm. “Oh, oh! was there ever such a mass of it before? Have you a knife about you, Ethan? I simply must have some for my school-room; it will make a dream of a decoration, and last all winter.”

Cynthia and Doris ran about and exclaimed and unwound the most splendid branches, but the Indian girl stood quite still and let the beauty of it all sink deep into her heart. Years later, the sight of a red-gold spray, or even the very name of “bitter-sweet,” brought up that riot of color on the rocky knoll, and the wordless sadness of those veiled and lonely hills.

“Now, girls, we simply must get on, or it will be dark before we can walk to Wolcott’s Woods and back again,” declared Ethan resolutely, shutting his knife with a snap. The whole party followed his lead past a fringe of hemlock, maple, hornbeam and white birch, on to a wild and deep glen that suddenly opened at their very feet, with a foaming brook in its heart. Scrambling down the steep sides of the miniature canyon, they followed the stream to its outlet in a tiny pond, which is flanked on one side by the finest grove of pine in Laurel township.

“This is Uncle Si’s ice-pond,” announced Doris, proudly, “and these are Wolcott’s Woods!”

It was so mild that Ethan insisted upon taking off his coat, cushioning a giant log where the girls might sit and rest after their three-mile tramp, while the sun already glowed red through the autumn haze, near to the western horizon.

“Aren’t you glad we came, Jibby?” urged Sin, ecstatically.

“Jibby … another of those names of yours, I suppose,” teased Ethan, gently.

“No, not my name at all,” she told him, holding her head the least bit higher. “My school name is Stella, because it is the Latin for Star. I was called Yellow Star before that, because it is the English of my own name.”

“And that is?”

“I do think you could not pronounce it, but I will say it very slowly. Wee-chah´-pee-zee´-wee—like that. No, the second syllable is rough—in the throat—so!”

“Aspirate,” suggested Miss Morrison; and each in turn tried to pronounce the queer name, with varying success.

“I chose that name for myself when I was four years old,” Stella went on, quite seriously. “I was looking up through the teepee door at the bright yellow stars overhead. I did not like the name the old women gave me; it is a sad name; Ish-na´-nee-un´-lah—The-One-who-was-left-Alive!”

Everybody was listening eagerly, for the brave little exile seldom spoke of herself unless in answer to a direct question, and a curious sort of dignity that she had about her forbade too close questioning. Now it seemed that the unspoken comradeship of the hour had unloosed her tongue, and something, too, of the softness and quiet pathos of the late November afternoon had crept into her expressive voice.

She raised her eyes to the four sympathetic faces that were gazing straight into her own, and the color rose under her clear, dark skin as she asked:

“Shall I tell you how they came to give me that sad name?”

“Oh, do!” “Tell us, tell us!” chorused the girls; but Ethan sat a little apart, and seemed absorbed in whittling a stick that he had picked up under the great pine.

“You have all heard of the fight at Wounded Knee?” began Yellow Star. “Perhaps you know how they fought—troops in uniform with big guns, against women and children and men whose guns had been taken from them?” (They nodded gravely.) “Well, it was three days after the fight that a party went out from the agency, eighteen miles away, to bury the dead Indians. The agency doctor went with them, and it was he who found wrapped in blankets, in her dead mother’s arms, and lying partly covered with snow—for there had been a snow-storm on the day before—a little baby, alive and crying.

“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.