meeting" in a little white-painted, pine box of a thing, like a barn
that had risen in life. The stumps stood about the street: the cows
wandered at will and pastured in the "public square," an irregular
clearing running out into indefinite space. Here also the Indians would
encamp when they came to town from their reservation about five miles
away, and here also, I regret to say, they would sometimes get drunk, and
add what Martha Penney calls "a revolving animosity to the scenery." The
squaws, however, would generally secure the knives and guns before the
quarrelsome stage was reached. Not unfrequently the ladies would bring the
weapons to Mrs. Moore or myself to hide away till their lords and masters
should be sober. Then, feeling secure that no great harm could happen,
they would look on with the utmost placidity at the antics of their better
halves until they dropped down to sleep off their liquor.

There were no Indians in town that night, however, and if there had been,
I was not at all afraid of them, for we were on excellent terms with the
whole reservation. My feeling about staying alone was merely one of those
unreasonable sensations that sometimes overtake people of ill-regulated
minds.

I went to the door and looked out at the gray, angry sky. It was not cold,
but chill. The wind howled and shivered among the leafless branches:
everything promised a storm.

I was not at all sorry to see Mr. and Mrs. Moore drive up in their light
buggy, with their two high-stepping, little brown horses. Mrs. Moore had
in her arms a bundle in a long blue embroidered cloak--a baby, in short.
She and her husband firmly believed this infant to be the most beautiful,
most intelligent and altogether most charming creature which the world had
ever seen. They had been married three years, and little Carry was their
first child.

Mr. and Mrs. Moore were by no means ordinary people. Mrs. Moore--born
Minny or Hermione Adams--was a very small woman, exceedingly pretty, with
light brown curly hair, dark blue eyes and a complexion like an apple
blossom.

Mr. Moore was the son of a Seneca mother and Cherokee father, with not a
drop of white blood in his veins. So he thought, at least, but I never
could quite believe it, because he could and did work, and never so much
as touched even a glass of wine. His parents had died when he was very
young, and he had been brought up and educated by a missionary, a gentle,
scholarly old Presbyter