her finger-tips.

"When an Indian goes through college and returns to his or her
people," she says with a smile, "they say, 'Back to the blanket!' We
have few blankets among the Cherokees in Tahlequah. I am the
youngest of nine children, and we are all of us college graduates,
as my father was before us."

He is John Ross 3d, Chief of the Cherokee Nation, of mingled Scotch
and Indian blood, in descent from "Cooweeskowee," John Ross I., the
rugged old Indian King who held out against Andrew Jackson back in
1838 for the ancient rights of the Five Nations to their lands along
the Southern Atlantic States.

She sat back on the broad window seat in the sunlight. Beyond the
window lay a bird's-eye view of New York housetops, the white man's
permanent tepee. Some spring birds alighted on a nearby telephone
wire, sending out twittering mating cries to each other.

"They make me want to go home," she said with a swift, expressive
gesture. "But I will stay until the answer comes to us. Do you know
what they have called me, the old men and women who are wise--the
full-bloods? Galilolie--'One-who-does-things-well.' With us, when a
name is given it is one with a meaning, something the child must
grow to in fulfillment. So I feel I must not fail them now."

"You see," she went on, lifting her chin, "it is we young
half-bloods who must carry the strength and honor of our people to
the world so it may understand us. All our lives we have been told
tales by the old men--how our people were driven from their homes by
the Government, how Gen. Winfield Scott's soldiers came down into
our quiet villages and ordered the Indians to go forth leaving
everything behind them. My great-grandfather, the old King
Cooweeskowee, with his wife and children, paused at the first
hilltop to look back at his home, and already the whites were moving
into it. The house is still standing at Rossville, Ga. Do you know
what the old people tell us children when we wish we could go back
there?" Her eyes are half closed, her lips compressed as she says
slowly, thrillingly: "They tell us it is easy to find the way over
that 'Trail of Tears,' that through the wilderness it is blazed with
the gravestones of those who were too weak to march.

"That was seventy years ago, in 1838. The Government promised to pay
amply