wretchedly homesick and anything but companionable, and yet Jessie
Dean's kind heart had warmed to this friendless waif and she became her
champion, her ally, and later, much to her genuine surprise, almost her
idol. It presently transpired that "the Pappoose," as the girls
nicknamed her because it was learned that she had been rocked in an
Indian cradle and had long worn moccasins instead of shoes (which
accounted for her feet being so much finer in their shape than those of
her fellows), was quick and intelligent beyond her years, that, though
apparently hopelessly behind in all their studies at the start, and
provoking ridicule and sneers during the many weeks of her loneliness
and home-longing, she suddenly began settling to her work with grim
determination, surprising her teachers and amazing her mates by the vim
and originality of her methods, and, before the end of the year,
climbing for the laurels with a mental strength and agility that put
other efforts to the blush. Then came weeks of bliss spent with a doting
father at Niagara, the seashore and the Point--a dear old dad as ill at
ease in Eastern circles as his daughter had been at first at school,
until he found himself welcomed with open arms to the officers'
mess-rooms at the Point, for John Folsom was as noted a frontiersman as
ever trod the plains, a man old officers of the cavalry and infantry
knew and honored as "a square trader" in the Indian country--a man whom
the Indians themselves loved and trusted far and wide, and when a man
has won the trust and faith of an Indian let him grapple it to his
breast as a treasure worth the having, great even as "the heart love of
a child." Sioux, Shoshone and Cheyenne, they would turn to "Old John" in
their councils, their dealings, their treaties, their perplexities, for
when he said a thing was right and square their doubts were gone, and
there at the Point the now well-to-do old trader met men who had known
him in by-gone days at Laramie and Omaha, and there his pretty
schoolgirl daughter met her bosom friend's big brother Marshall, a first
classman in all his glory, dancing with damsels in society, while she
was but a maiden shy in short dresses. Oh, how Jess had longed to be of
that party to the Point, but her home was in the far West, her father
long dead and buried, her mother an invalid, and the child was needed
there. Earnestly had old Folsom written, begging that she who had been
so kind to his little girl