Oh, if the "Blackcoat" would
only cease to talk of it! Now I know he saw its effect upon us, and
he used it as a whip to lash us into his new religion, but even then
my mother must have known, for each time he left the tepee she would
watch him going slowly away across the prairie; then when he was
disappearing into the far horizon she would laugh scornfully, and
say:
"If the white man made this Blackcoat's hell, let him go to it. It
is for the man who found it first. No hell for Indians, just Happy
Hunting Grounds. Blackcoat can't scare me."
And then, after weeks had passed, one day as he stood at the tepee
door he laid his white, old hand on my head and said to my father:
"Give me this little girl, chief. Let me take her to the mission
school; let me keep her, and teach her of the great God and His
eternal heaven. She will grow to be a noble woman, and return
perhaps to bring her people to the Christ."
My mother's eyes snapped. "No," she said. It was the first word she
ever spoke to the "Blackcoat." My father sat and smoked. At the end
of a half-hour he said:
"I am an old man, Blackcoat. I shall not leave the God of my fathers.
I like not your strange God's ways--all of them.
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