BIG AND LITTLE SISTERS

A Story of an Indian Mission School

By THEODORA R. JENNESS


CHAPTER I.

It was a Saturday morning in December at the Indian Mission School.
Two young Sioux girls were going up the stairs--Hannah Straight Tree and
Cordelia Running Bird. It was their Saturday for cleaning. The two
girls drew a heavy breath in prospect of the difficult task that
confronted them. The great unplastered mission building was a chilly
place throughout the winter, and the halls and stairway that morning
were drafty from the blustering wind that swept the Dakota plains and
came through the outer doors below, where restless children kept going
to and fro continually. The young hall-girls shivered on the upper
landing, and stepped back in a sheltered niche in which the brooms were
hanging. They had thrown their aprons over their heads and shoulders,
and were dreading to begin their work.

"My floor and stairs always look nicer than your floor and stairs," said
Hannah Straight Tree to Cordelia Running Bird.

"Because you have the teachers' side, and that's always nicer, to begin
with, than the girls' side," answered Cordelia Running Bird. "You know
the teachers never walk whole-feet when you are scrubbing. If they have
to go by, they walk tiptoe, and their toes are sharp and clean and do
not make big tracks. But all the children on my side walk whole-feet