Adventure stories; Automobile travel -- Fiction; Inheritance and succession -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
Nothing loath, Diane promptly tethered her horse and squatted Indian
fashion by the cartwheel fire, immensely thrilled and diverted by her
picturesque adventure.
"My name," she offered presently with her ready smile, "is Diane."
"Di-ane," said the Indian girl majestically. And added naively, "She
was the Roman goddess of light--and of hunting, is it not so?"
Diane looked very blank.
"Where in the world--" she stammered, staring, and colored.
The Indian girl smiled.
"From _so_ high," she said shyly, "I have been taught by Mic-co. Like
the white student of books, I know many curious things that he has
taught me."
"And your name?" asked Diane, heroically mastering her mystified
confusion. "May I--may I not know that too?"
"Shock-kil-law," came the ready reply.
"That readily becomes Keela!" exclaimed Diane smiling.
The girl nodded.
"So Mic-co has said. And so indeed he calls me."
"Tell me, Keela, what does it mean?"
"Red-winged blackbird," said Keela.
It was eminently fitting, thought Diane, and glanced at Keela's hair
and cheeks.
There was a wild duck roasting in the hub of coals--from the burning
spokes came the smell of cedar. The Indian girl majestically broke a
segment of koonti bread and proffered it to her companion. With
faultless courtesy Diane accepted and presently partook with healthy
relish of a supper of duck and sweet potatoes.
The silence of the Indian girl was utterly without constraint.
"I wonder," begged Diane impetuously, "if you'll tell me who Mic-co is?
I'm greatly interested. He taught you about Rome?"
Nodding, the Indian girl said in her quaint, deliberate English that
Mic-co was her white foster father. The Seminoles called him
Es-ta-chat-tee-mic-co--chief of the White Race. Most of them called
him simply Mic-co. He was a great and good medicine man of much wisdom
who dwelt upon a fertile chain of swamp islands in the Everglades. The
Indians loved him.
Still puzzled, Diane diffidently ventured a question or two, marveling
afresh at the girl's beauty and singular costume.
"I am of no race," said Keela sombrely. "My father was a white man; my
mother not all Indian; my grandfather--a Minorcan. Six moons I live
with my white foster father. And I live then as I wish--like the
daughter of white men. Six moons I dwell with the clan of my mother.
Such is my life since the old chief made the compact with Mic-co.
Come!" she added and led the way to the Indian wagon.
"When the night-winds call," she said wistfully, "I grow restless--for
I am happiest in the lodge of Mic-co. Then the old chief bids me
travel to the world of white men and sell." There was gentle pathos in
her mellow voice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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