Page:The Cabin at the Trail's End.djvu/23

with blue eyes and light curly hair. She was freckled like a turkey egg, but her forehead under her ragged straw hat was of a milky whiteness that contrasted pleasantly with her tan. Esther Amelia, eight, was as dark and swarthy as a young Indian. The two boys, Manuel and Asa, were thirteen and eleven. Manuel at thirteen was tall and inclined to be muscular after the awkward fashion of adolescence. He had, since starting across the plains, done a man’s work with the oxen, the wood-cutting, or any of the various duties about the camp. He prided himself on his ability with a rifle. Uncle Adzi believed in boys learning the ways of men early in life, and had tutored him carefully in hunting and trapping and fishing. Asa, small for his years, followed carefully in the footsteps of his elder brother; he, too, was learning to use a gun.

All four of the children were barefooted. The boys’ homespun butternut jeans were in tatters. Bare brown skin showed through holes in the knees, and missing buttons, which had secured the pantaloons to the jumper, had been supplanted with pewter from an old spoon carefully molded into shape. On their tow heads were ancient coonskin caps, badly moth-eaten and punctured here and there with arrows where they had been set up for target practice.

Rose Ann and Esther Amelia fared rather better than the boys. Both wore straight Indian dresses of soft gray buckskin, jauntily trimmed with scarlet flannel and beautifully beaded and fringed. These dresses were a source of great pride. Sticcus, the