"But I do not know if I can feather-stitch it now, for there is no one to teach me, that I know of. Just like Hannah Straight Tree and the dormitory girls will tell the whole school to hate me, and they will. If I cannot get a large girl to help make the red dress, and I try to do it all alone, it will fit so bad, and I cannot get it done in time. What if I should tell my mother to have Susie stay at camp, and not once come inside the yard Christmas time? Then she would not need the dresses, and they could not call them issue goods, and not choose Susie in the games, and shut their eyes at her." Cordelia lay very still, but the thought of Susie's missing the festivities by staying in the big building in the mission pasture, where the Indian visitors camped in winter, was put from her in short order. "Susie shall not stay in camp. I shall find a way to get the dresses done, and she shall motion Jack Frost and see the Christmas tree. I shall tell them I am tired of playing silly games, and Susie shall not play, either, so they cannot leave her out. And I shall tell the school they must not watch Susie motion, for they are such horrid Indians they would scare her very bad. When Hannah Straight Tree's big and little sister come into the playroom I shall walk close up to them and pull my dress away, and look at it so sharp, and say, so Hannah hears me, 'Those wild Indians have so many grease spots I am much afraid of catching them.'" While plotting these misdeeds Cordelia Running Bird fell asleep. A young girl from the teachers' table brought her dinner on a tray and set it by the bed without awaking her. She did not wake up until near the middle of the afternoon. She found that the white mother had stolen into the dormitory with a small book which she had placed upon the pillow. There was a narrow white ribbon, frayed and yellow, wound around the book and tied on one side in a bow. The rooms below now were quiet, for the wind had lulled and the entire school was out of doors. Looking from the window near her bed, Cordelia saw the broad, white plains illumined with brilliant sunshine and the girls exercising on the glittering crust of snow occasioned by the thaw. The little girls were sliding down hill on boards and broken shovels, cast-off dripping-pans and ash-pans--everything, indeed, that could be seized on for coasting. A group of large and middle-sized girls were walking over the mission pasture, stretching for a mile on every side. Another band of girls was packed into a long, wide bob-sled on the point of starting with the white mother to the little log post office down the river.