Emerson's Wife and Other Western StoriesKelly, Florence Finch
General
Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories
Kelly, Florence Finch
Western stories
"Mrs. Governor Coolidge and guests returned yesterday from a trip to
Acoma. As always, Mrs. Coolidge was the life of the party and charmed
all by her wit and beauty and vivacity. . . . She even persuaded old
Ambrosio, the grizzled civil chief of the pueblo, to entrust to her care
his most precious treasure, his lovely and charming daughter, Miss
Barbara Koitza. This beautiful and talented young lady, whom Mrs.
Coolidge has installed as a friend and guest in her hospitable and
interesting home, where she is soon to be introduced to Santa Fe society,
is as cultured as she is handsome. She has spent a year in the Indian
school at Albuquerque and two years at Carlyle, and is well fitted to
adorn the choicest social circles in the land. She will no doubt be
warmly welcomed by Santa Fe society and will at once take that position
in its midst to which her beauty, grace, and talents entitle her."
If she had known of it, poor little Barbara would have been overwhelmed
by this flourish of trumpets. But Colonel Kate did not allow it to fall
under her eye. And the girl did not even know that, whatever she was
not, she certainly was interesting and picturesque on the day when she
first entered her new friend's door.
She wore her Indian costume, and was neat and clean as any white maiden
with a heritage of bath-tubs. Spotlessly white were her buckskin
moccasins and leggings, which encased a pair of tiny feet and then wound
round and round her sturdy legs until they looked as shapeless as
telegraph posts. Her scant, red calico skirt met her leggings at the
knee; and her red mantle, of Navajo weave, fell back from her head, but
wrapped closely her waist and arms, and then dropped long ends down the
front of her dress. Her coal-black hair, heavy and shining, was combed
smoothly back from her forehead and fastened in a _chongo_ behind. Her
brown face was handsomer than that of most Indian maidens, being longer
in proportion to its width than is the pueblo type, the cheek bones less
prominent, the forehead broader, and the lips fuller and more delicately
chiselled. It is possible that, far back in Barbara's ancestry, perhaps
even as far back as the times of the _Conquistadores_, there had been
some admixture of the white man's race which, after generations of
quiescence, in her had at last made its influence felt again.
As Mrs. Coolidge led the girl into her new home she looked down at her
with approving eye and inwardly exclaimed, the conqueror's joy already
filling her heart, "She 'll be a success! A tremendous success! The
Colonel's wife can do what she pleases now!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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