"Here, my child, are the white man's papers. Read a little from them,"
she said most piously.

I took it from her hand, for her sake; but my enraged spirit felt more
like burning the book, which afforded me no help, and was a perfect
delusion to my mother. I did not read it, but laid it unopened on the
floor, where I sat on my feet. The dim yellow light of the braided
muslin burning in a small vessel of oil flickered and sizzled in the
awful silent storm which followed my rejection of the Bible.

Now my wrath against the fates consumed my tears before they reached my
eyes. I sat stony, with a bowed head. My mother threw a shawl over her
head and shoulders, and stepped out into the night.

After an uncertain solitude, I was suddenly aroused by a loud cry
piercing the night. It was my mother's voice wailing among the barren
hills which held the bones of buried warriors. She called aloud for her
brothers' spirits to support her in her helpless misery. My fingers Grey
icy cold, as I realized that my unrestrained tears had betrayed my
suffering to her, and she was grieving for me.

Before she returned, though I knew she was on her way, for she had
ceased her weeping, I extinguished the light, and leaned my head on the
window sill.

Many schemes of running away from my surroundings hovered about in my
mind. A few more moons of such a turmoil drove me away to the eastern
school. I rode on the white man's iron steed, thinking it would bring me
back to my mother in a few winters, when I should be grown tall, and
there would be congenial friends awaiting me.