E-text prepared by Al Haines Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original lovely illustrations. See 14784-h.htm or 14784-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/7/8/14784/14784-h/14784-h.htm) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/7/8/14784/14784-h.zip) TIMID HARE The Little Captive by MARY H. WADE Author of "Little Cousin Series", etc. Illustrated by Louis Betts Whitman Publishing Co. Racine -- Chicago 1916 [Illustration: Cover Art] [Frontispiece: Buffalo Rib was a Handsome Youth.] CONTENTS CAPTURED BEFORE THE CHIEF THE NEW HOME HARD WORK THE CHANGE THE VISIT THE MISCHIEF MAKER THE HAPPY DAY THE DOG FEAST THE FESTIVAL MOVING DAY THE JOURNEY THE MEDICINE MAN THE WINTER HUNT List of Color Plates Buffalo Rib Was a Handsome Youth The Stone and Her Son Black Bull Were Hurrying Home "Sweet Grass, Listen to Me" [Missing from book] "I Soon Had a Fire Started" Black Bull Was Helpless Bent Horn's Mind Was Made Up They Looked With Wonder at the Medicine Man "Help Me, Great Spirit" [Missing from book] CAPTURED Swift Fawn sat motionless on the river-bank. "Lap, lap," sang the tiny waves as they struck the shore. "Lap, lap," they kept repeating, but the little girl did not heed the soft music. Her mind was too busy with the story White Mink had told her that morning. After the men had started off on a buffalo hunt Swift Fawn had left the other children to their games in the village and stolen away to the favorite bathing place of the women-folk. "No one will disturb me there," she had said to herself, "and I want to be all by myself to think it over." After she had been there for sometime. Swift Fawn drew out from the folds of her deerskin jacket a baby's sock, and turned it over and over in her hands curiously. Never had she seen the like of it before. How pretty it was! Who could have had the skill to weave the threads of scarlet silk in and out of the soft wool in such a dainty pattern? Was it--the child whispered the word--could it have been her mother? White Mink had always been so good to her, Surely no real mother could have been more loving than the Indian woman who had watched over her and tended her, and taught her from the time when Three Bears had brought her, a year-old baby, to his wife. Where he found the little one, he had never told. And so she was a white child. How strange it was! Yet she had grown up into a big girl, loving the ways of the red people more and more deeply for eight happy years. "Surely," thought the child, "I could not have loved my own parents more than I do White Mink and Three Bears." "I wish--oh, so hard!" she added with a lump in her throat, "that White Mink had not told me. I don't want to remember there ever was--something different."