l; but in a private talk the very day before, the
teachers had referred to her in some perplexity.

"I wish Cordelia Running Bird were a little different," said the
school-teacher. "She leads her class, and is a credit to the school in
most respects, but she is rather too ambitious to outdo others. It
creates jealousy."

"I have observed that she is notional in the making of her dresses,"
said the sewing teacher. "She is apt to want the skirt a little wider
and the hem a half-inch deeper than the regular uniform. And she asks
to have more buttonholes, which means more buttons, and an extra ruffle
on the waist. But she begs me so politely and appears so thankful, if I
grant these trifling favors, that I find myself indulging her too
frequently. She does the extra work herself, cheerfully and neatly, if
not speedily, but closely watched by others. She has learned as if by
intuition that variety is the spice of life, but she seems unconscious
of the fact that she makes the other girls discontented. But she is so
pleasant and obedient, as a rule, that minor faults may be forgiven
her," the white mother charitably concluded.

CHAPTER II.

As something quite unusual at that season in the Dakotas, there had been
a thaw the day before, and a great quantity of mud had been tracked in
on the girls' side by the sewing classes coming from the schoolhouse,
separate from the main mission building, to the upstairs room in which
the sewing work was done.

Hannah Straight Tree quickly swept her portion of the hall, for there
was but little mud on the teachers' side, and was proceeding to her
stairs before Cordelia Running Bird was half way along her floor.

"You have not taken up your dirt! You have swept it over on my side!"
exclaimed Cordelia Running Bird, who, with all her close attention to
her own work, kept a sharp eye on the other's movements.

"There is little, and it will not be much work to take it up with
yours," was Hannah's reply. "When we finished yesterday I lent our
dustpan to the middle dormitory girls--they said theirs was too broken
--and they lost it. Now they say they can borrow the south dormitory
dustpan, and they shall not hunt ours. You can always find things better
than I can, so you must hunt it and take up my dirt," was Hannah
Straight Tree's demand.

"Tokee! How strange you talk!" exclaimed Cordelia Running Bird, in
amazement. "The dormitory girls must ask for a new dustpan if the