The Sun Maid: A Story of Fort Dearborn

Abel closed the outer door, and crossed to the well-stocked cupboard. As he stood contemplating its contents, and undecided as to which would really best suit his present mood, there came a sound of somebody approaching the house along the slippery footpath. This was so unexpected that it startled the pioneer. Then he reflected: “Mercy. She’s come back!” and remained guiltily standing with his hand upon the edge of a pie plate, like a school-boy pilfering his mother’s larder.

“Rat-a-tat-a-tat!”

“Somebody knockin’! That ain’t Mercy! Who the land, I wonder!”

He made haste to see and opened the heavy door to the demand of a young boy, who stood shivering before it. At a little distance further from the house was, also, a woman wrapped in a blanket that glistened with sleet, and which seemed to enfold besides herself the form of a little child.

“My land! my land! Why, bubby! where in the world did you drop from? Is that your ma? No. I see she’s an Indian, an’ you’re as white as the frost itself. Come in. Come right in.”

But the lad lingered on the threshold and asked with chattering teeth, which showed how chilled he was:

“Can Wahneenah come too?”

“I don’t know who in Christendom Wahneeny is, but you folks all come straight in out of the storm. ’Twon’t do to keep the door open so long, for the sleet’s beating right in on Mercy’s carpet. There’d be the dickens to pay if she saw that.”

Gaspar, for it was he, ran quickly back toward the motionless Wahneenah, and, clutching the corner of her blanket, dragged her forward. She seemed reluctant to follow, notwithstanding her half-frozen condition and she glanced into Abel’s honest face with keen inquiry. Yet seeing nothing but good-natured pity in it, she entered the cabin, and herself shut the door. Yet she kept her place close to the exit, even after Gaspar had pulled the blanket apart and revealed the white face of the Sun Maid lying on her breast.

“Why, why, why! poor child! Poor little creatur’. Where in the world did you hail from to be out in such weather? Didn’t you have ary home to stay in? But, there. I needn’t ask that, because there’s Mercy off trapesing just the same, an’ her with the best cabin on the frontier. I s’pose this Wahneeny was took with a gossipin’ fit, too, an’ set out to find her own cronies. But I don’t recollect as I’ve heard of any Indians livin’ out this way.”

By this time the water that had been frozen upon the wanderers’ clothing had begun to melt, and was drip-dripping in little puddles upon Mercy’s beloved carpet. Abel eyed these with dismay, and finally hit upon the happy expedient of turning back the loose breadth of the heavy fabric which bordered the hearth. Upon the bare boards thus revealed he placed three chairs, and invited his guests to take them.

Gaspar dropped into one very promptly, but the squaw did not advance until the boy cried:

“Do come, Other Mother. Poor Kitty will wake up then, and feel all right.”

The atmosphere of any house was always uncomfortable to Wahneenah. Even then, she felt as if she had stepped from freedom into prison, cold though she was and half-famished with hunger. Personally, she would rather have taken her bit of food out under the trees; but the thought of her Sun Maid was always powerful to move her. She laid aside the wet blanket, and carried the drowsy little one to the fireside, where the warmth soon revived the child so that she sat up on her foster-mother’s lap, and gazed about her with awakening curiosity. Then she began to smile on Abel, who stood regarding her wonderful loveliness with undisguised amazement, and to prattle to him in her accustomed way.

“Why, you nice, nice man! Isn’t this a pretty place. Isn’t it beau’ful warm? I’m so glad we came. It was cold out of doors, wasn’t it, Other Mother? Did you know all the time what a good warm fire was here? Was that why we came?”

“I knew nothing,” answered Wahneenah, stolidly.

“But I did!” cried Gaspar. “As soon as I saw the smoke of your chimney I said: ‘That is a white man’s house. We will go and stay in it.’ It’s a nice house, sir, and, like Kitty, I am glad we came. Do you live here all alone?”

“No. My wife, Mercy, has gone a visitin’. That’s why I happen to be here doin’ nothin’. I mean – I might have been to the barn an’ not heard you. You’re lookin’ into that cupboard pretty sharp. Be you hungry? But I needn’t ask that. A boy always is.”

“I am hungry. We all are. We haven’t had anything to eat in – days, I guess. Are those pies – regular pies, on the shelves?”

“Yes. Do you like pies?”

“I used to. I haven’t had any since I left the Fort.”

“Left what?”

“The Fort. Fort Dearborn. Did you know it?”

“Course. That is, about it. But there ain’t no Fort now. Don’t tell stories.”

“I’m not. I’m telling the truth.”

If this was a refugee from that unhappy garrison, Abel felt that he could not do enough for the boy’s comfort. He could not refrain his suspicious glances from Wahneenah’s dark face, but as she kept her own gaze fixed upon the ground, he concluded she did not see them. In any case, she was only an Indian, and therefore to be treated with scant courtesy.

Mercy would have been surprised to see with what handiness her husband played the host in her absence and now he whipped off the red woollen cover from the table and rolled it toward the fireplace. But she would not have approved at all of the lavishness with which he set before his guests the best things from her cupboard. There was a cold rabbit patty, the pot of beans, light loaves of sweet rye bread, and a pat of golden butter. To these he added a generous pitcher of milk, and beside Gaspar’s own plate he placed both a pumpkin and a dried-apple pie.

“I’d begin with these, if I was you, sonny. Baked beans come by nature, seems to me, but pies are a gift of grace. Though I must say my wife don’t stint ’em when she takes it into her head to go gallivantin’ an’ leaves me to housekeep. ’Pears to think then I must have somethin’ sort of comfortin’. I’d start in on pie, if I was a little shaver, an’ take the beans last.”

This might not have been the best of advice to give a lad whose fast had been so long continued as Gaspar’s, but it suited that young person exactly. Indeed, in all his life he had never seen so well spread a table, and he lost no time in obeying his entertainer’s suggestion. But he noticed with regret that his foster-mother did not touch the proffered food, and that she ministered even gingerly to Kitty’s wants.

Yet there was nobody, however austere or unhappy, who could long resist the happy influence of the little girl, and least of all the woman who so loved her. As the Sun Maid’s color returned to her face, and her stiffened limbs began to resume their suppleness, something of the anxiety left Wahneenah’s eyes, and she condescended to receive a bowl of milk and a slice of bread from Abel’s hand.

The fact that she would at last break her own fast made all comfortable; and as soon as Gaspar’s appetite was so far appeased that he could begin upon the beans, the settler demanded:

“Now, sonny, talk. Tell me the whole endurin’ story from A to Izzard. Where’d you come from now? Where was you bound? What’s your name? an’ her’s? an’ the little tacker’s? My! but ain’t she a beauty! I never see ary such hair on anybody’s head, black or white. It’s gettin’ dry, ain’t it; an’ how it does fly round, just like foam.”

“I’m not ‘sonny,’ nor ‘bubby.’ I’m Gaspar Keith. I was brought up at Fort Dearborn. After the massacre, I was taken to Muck-otey-pokee. I – ”

But the lad’s thoughts already began to grow sombre, and he became so abruptly silent that Abel prompted him.

“Hmm, I’ve heard of that – that – Mucky place. Indian settlement, wasn’t it? Took prisoner, was you?”

“No. I wasn’t a prisoner, exactly. I was just a – just a friend of the family, I guess.”

“Oh? So. A friend of an Indian family, sonny?”

“If you’d rather not call me Gaspar, you can please say ‘Dark-Eye.’ That’s my new Indian name; but I hate those other ones. They make me think I am a baby. And I’m not. I am a man, almost.”

“So you be. So you be,” agreed Abel, admiring the little fellow’s spirit. “I ’low you’ve seen sights, now, hain’t you?”

“Yes, dreadful ones; so dreadful that I can’t talk about them to anybody. Not even to you, who have given us this nice food and let us warm ourselves. I would if I could, you see; only when I let myself think, I just get queer in the head and afraid. So I won’t even think. It doesn’t do for a boy to be afraid. Not when he has his mother and sister to take care of.”

There was the faintest lightening of the gloom upon the Indian woman’s face as Dark-Eye said this. But he was, apart from his terror of bloodshed and fighting, a courageous lad, and had, during their past days of wandering, proved the good stuff of which he was made. Many a day he had gone without eating that the remnant of their food might be saved for the Sun Maid; and though it was, of course, Wahneenah who had taken all the care of the children, if it pleased him to consider their cases reversed he should be left to his own opinion.

“You’re right, boy. I’ll call you Gaspar, easy enough. Only, you see, I hain’t got no sons of my own an’ it kind of makes things seem cosier if I call other folkes’s youngsters that way. Every little shaver this side of Illinois calls me ‘Uncle Abe,’ I reckon. But go on with your yarn. My, my, my! Won’t Mercy be beat when she comes home an’ hears all that’s happened whilst she was gone. Go on.”

So Gaspar told all that had occurred since the Black Partridge parted from his sister in the cavern and rode away toward St. Joseph’s. How that very day came one of the visiting Indians who had been staying at Muck-otey-pokee and whose behavior toward the neighboring white settlers had been a prominent cause of bringing the soldiers’ raid upon the innocent and friendly hosts who had entertained him.

The wicked like not solitude, and in the train of this traitor had followed many others. These had turned the cave into a pandemonium and had appropriated to their own uses the stores which Black Partridge had provided for Wahneenah. When to this robbery they had added threats against the lives of the white children, whose presence at the Indian village they in their turn declared had brought destruction upon it, the chief’s sister had taken such small portion of her own property as she could secure and had set out to find a new home or shelter for her little ones.

Since then they had been always wandering. Wahneenah now had a fixed dread of the pale-faces and had avoided their habitations as far as might be. They had lived in the woods, upon the roots and dried berries they could find and whose power to sustain life the squaw had understood. But now had come the cold of approaching winter and the Sun Maid had shown the effects of her long exposure. Then, at Gaspar’s pleading, Wahneenah had put her own distrust of strangers aside and had come with him to the first cabin of white people which they could find.

“And now we’re here, what will you do with us?” concluded the lad, fixing his dark eyes earnestly upon his host’s face.

Abel fidgetted a little; then, with his happy faculty of putting off till to-morrow the evil that belonged to to-day, he replied:

“Well, son – bub – I mean, Gaspar; we hain’t come to that bridge yet. Time enough to cross it when we do. But, say, that little creatur’ looks as if she hadn’t known what ’twas to lie on a decent bed in a month of Sundays. She’s ’bout dried off now; an’ my! ain’t she a pretty sight in them little Indian’s togs! S’pose your squaw-ma puts her to sleep on the bed yonder. Notice that bedstead? There ain’t another like it this side the East. I’ll just spread a sheet over the quilt, to keep it clean, an’ she can snooze there all day, if she likes. I’ll play you an’ Wahneeny a tune on my fiddle if you want me to.”

Gaspar was, of course, delighted with this offer but the chief’s sister was already tired of the hot house and had cast longing glances through the small window toward the barn in the rear. That, at least, would be cool, and from its doorway she calculated she could keep a close watch upon the door of the cabin, and be ready at a second’s notice to rush to her children’s aid should harm be offered them. Meanwhile, for this dark day, they would have the comfort to which their birthright entitled them. So she went out and left them with Abel.

The hours flew by and the storm continued. Abel had never been happier nor jollier; and as the twilight came down, and he finally gave up all expectation of Mercy’s immediate return, he waxed fairly hilarious, cutting up absurd antics for the mere delight of seeing the Sun Maid laugh and dance in response, and because, under these cheerful conditions, Gaspar’s face was losing its premature thoughtfulness and rounding to a look more suited to his years.