Cordelia Running Bird gave her broom a sudden push and sent the sweepings flying backward in a cloud.

“Now look how mean you are!  Again I have to sweep my floor!” cried Hannah Straight Tree, angrily.  “Proud—­vain—­cross—­mean!” She counted the four failings on her fingers.

“Not the least bit do I care,” replied Cordelia Running Bird, stung beyond endurance by Hannah’s taunts.  “I was not cross at first, but now I am, because you call me four bad names.  I am now glad your little sister cannot play the games, or motion in one song, or even have an ugly green dress.  I am not sorry that your big and little sister cannot come to school, and very much I wish I had not learned the motto.”

Here the young Sioux girl, who was compelled to battle with hereditary pride and stubbornness in every effort to do right, forgot the white mother’s admonition that the heart might be a dark place and a cold place needing to be cleansed of evil thoughts.

Hannah Straight Tree did not hunt the dustpan, but with perseverance worthy of a better cause, she brushed the sweepings from her floor and stairs upon a ragged palm-leaf fan which she discovered in a corner, and, dropping them into the scrub-pail, took them out of doors.  Cordelia brought a shoe-box from her cupboard in the playroom and applied it as an inconvenient dustpan.  Meanwhile dustpan Number 8 remained in the darkest corner of the middle dormitory closet, where it had been pushed in the rush of clearing up the day before.

Cordelia Running Bird’s work of making clean her floor and stairs was even harder than she had expected.  Never had there seemed so many errands to and fro by those who did the weekly cleaning in the three dormitories, numbering quite a force.  The thaw had ended in a freezing snow squall in the night, but a sufficient quantity of mud was clinging to the broad soles of the government shoes that tramped across Cordelia’s wet floor to insure a startling trail of footprints.

“I cannot keep them up, they come again so fast,” she murmured to herself in grim despair, while wringing out her mop-rag to attack a line of tracks imprinted by the largest girl in school, in going to and from the laundry to dispose of laid-off sheets and pillow-cases. “Ver-ry hor-r-i-d pictures of the ugly issue shoes.  I will not wear them.  I am wearing kid store shoes my father buys for every day.  The dormitory girls are shovel-feeted, and I Wish they could not walk one step—­only lie in bed!”

She was overheard by Hannah Straight Tree, coming up the girls’ stairs at that moment.  Hannah’s own work had been done with little difficulty, and she had obtained permission to help the middle dormitory girls, for reasons all her own.

The reckless speech was repeated to the dormitory girls by Hannah Straight Tree, much to their displeasure.

“The dormitory girls are shovel-feeted, and she wishes they could not walk one step, only lie in bed!” exclaimed the largest girl, sitting down on a straw-tick to discuss the matter.  “Then we should be cripples, and, tokee! how many cripples there would be!”