"Yes. Chief Barrows wants the secret, and he has sent the man who drives cows here to make me tell it." "Singing Bird, you must tell me the secret." "I will." Stella settled herself to hear the Indian girl's story. "It began when I was a little child," said Singing Bird. "One time when my father's tribe was hunting, we came to a place where a lot of white men were digging in the sands of the big, muddy river." "Was that the Missouri?" "The white men call it so. We camped beside them, and one day I saw them washing out of the sand little grains of yellow metal, which they thought much of, although the Indians would rather have iron, the black metal." "They were hunting for gold." "Yes. In their talk with my father they said that somewhere up the river was the mother of the gold, where all this came from. They asked my father if he knew where it was. "Now, my father had found where there was plenty of the yellow metal. But he, too, was shrewd, and, seeing that the white men prized it so highly, he thought he would go back and get the gold, and sell it to the white men for iron and shot and powder and blankets. "The white men guessed that he knew where the mother of gold was, and asked him. But he refused to tell them, and went away. "The white men followed us for days. One evening I was with my mother, and heard my father tell her where the yellow metal was on the opposite side of the river, pointing to a great sycamore tree that grew on the river bank. 'Beneath that tree lies much of the yellow metal,' he said to her, and I saw the tree, and knew what he said was true. "That night the white men came to our camp and had a long talk with my father, trying to make him tell where the mother gold was, and, when he would not, suddenly they fell upon the camp, and, after killing some of the young men, drove my father and the others away. At the first shot my mother ran away into the woods with me." "That was horrible," interjected Stella. "As my mother ran, she was shot in the back, but she kept on running until she was out of sight before she fell. "Then the white men went away, and I lay there with my mother until she breathed no more and was cold. "I cried for a long time because it was dark and cold, and I could hear the wild animals in the woods all about me. "This frightened me, and I began to call 'Ai-i-e!' which is the Indian way of lamentation, and I cried louder all the time to keep the wild animals from me." "And did no one hear you?" "Yes. In the night I heard a noise in the wood, and it was the noise of a man walking, an Indian man, for it was soft, made by moccasins. Then I cried louder, and soon my father came and picked both me and my mother up in his arms and carried us away into the woods, where he buried my mother, and went away into the North again.