Big and Little Sisters | Page 4

CHAPTER II.
As something quite unusual at that season in the Dakotas, there had
been a thaw the day before, and a great quantity of mud had been
tracked in on the girls' side by the sewing classes coming from the
schoolhouse, separate from the main mission building, to the upstairs
room in which the sewing work was done.
Hannah Straight Tree quickly swept her portion of the hall, for there
was but little mud on the teachers' side, and was proceeding to her
stairs before Cordelia Running Bird was half way along her floor.
"You have not taken up your dirt! You have swept it over on my side!"
exclaimed Cordelia Running Bird, who, with all her close attention to
her own work, kept a sharp eye on the other's movements.
"There is little, and it will not be much work to take it up with yours,"
was Hannah's reply. "When we finished yesterday I lent our dustpan to
the middle dormitory girls--they said theirs was too broken --and they
lost it. Now they say they can borrow the south dormitory dustpan, and
they shall not hunt ours. You can always find things better than I can,
so you must hunt it and take up my dirt," was Hannah Straight Tree's
demand.
"Tokee! How strange you talk!" exclaimed Cordelia Running Bird, in
amazement. "The dormitory girls must ask for a new dustpan if they
break theirs. It is not the rule to lend things, for it makes confusion; if
you lent the dustpan you must find it and take up your dirt, for I have
more to do than you. It is Number 8, and you can tell it when you see
it."

"You are very cross as well as proud and vain--and you have learned
the motto, every word. If I had learned the motto I should try to be
good," said Hannah Straight Tree.
"The motto does not say a girl can tell us we must do a work that is not
ours, and we must mind her. I shall sweep your dirt back," was the
warm reply.
Cordelia Running Bird gave her broom a sudden push and sent the
sweepings flying backward in a cloud.
"Now look how mean you are! Again I have to sweep my floor!" cried
Hannah Straight Tree, angrily. "Proud--vain--cross--mean!" She
counted the four failings on her fingers.
"Not the least bit do I care," replied Cordelia Running Bird, stung
beyond endurance by Hannah's taunts. "I was not cross at first, but now
I am, because you call me four bad names. I am now glad your little
sister cannot play the games, or motion in one song, or even have an
ugly green dress. I am not sorry that your big and little sister cannot
come to school, and very much I wish I had not learned the motto."
Here the young Sioux girl, who was compelled to battle with hereditary
pride and stubbornness in every effort to do right, forgot the white
mother's admonition that the heart might be a dark place and a cold
place needing to be cleansed of evil thoughts.
Hannah Straight Tree did not hunt the dustpan, but with perseverance
worthy of a better cause, she brushed the sweepings from her floor and
stairs upon a ragged palm-leaf fan which she discovered in a corner,
and, dropping them into the scrub-pail, took them out of doors.
Cordelia brought a shoe-box from her cupboard in the playroom and
applied it as an inconvenient dustpan. Meanwhile dustpan Number 8
remained in the darkest corner of the middle dormitory closet, where it
had been pushed in the rush of clearing up the day before.
Cordelia Running Bird's work of making clean her floor and stairs was
even harder than she had expected. Never had there seemed so many

errands to and fro by those who did the weekly cleaning in the three
dormitories, numbering quite a force. The thaw had ended in a freezing
snow squall in the night, but a sufficient quantity of mud was clinging
to the broad soles of the government shoes that tramped across
Cordelia's wet floor to insure a startling trail of footprints.
"I cannot keep them up, they come again so fast," she murmured to
herself in grim despair, while wringing out her mop-rag to attack a line
of tracks imprinted by the largest girl in school, in going to and from
the laundry to dispose of laid-off sheets and pillow-cases. "_Ver-ry
hor-r-i-d_ pictures of the ugly issue shoes. I will not wear them. I am
wearing kid store shoes my father buys for every day. The dormitory
girls are shovel-feeted, and I Wish they could not walk one step--only
lie in bed!"
She was overheard by Hannah Straight Tree, coming up the girls' stairs