One day as I was returning from it with my empty pail, a tidy, black-eyed woman came up to me and said,

“I’m a Cherokee Indian, the wife of one of the three drovers that sold the Brunners them long-horned cattle that was delivered the other day.  I know who you are, and if you’ll sit on that log by me, I’ll tell you something.”

We took the seats shaded by the fence and she continued with unmistakable pride:  “I can read and write quite a little, and me and the men belong to the same tribe.  We drove our band of cattle across the plains and over the Sierras, and have sold them for more than we expected to get.  We are going back the same road, but first I wanted to see you little girls.  I heard lots about your father’s party, and how you all suffered in the mountains, and that no one seems to remember what became of his body.  Now, child, I tell the truth.  I stood by your father’s grave and read his name writ on the headboard, and come to tell you that he was buried in a long grave near his own camp in the mountains.  I’m glad at seeing you, but am going away, wishing you wasn’t so cut off from your own people.”

So earnest was she, that I believed what she told me, and was sorry that I could not answer all her questions.  We parted as most people did in those days, feeling that the meeting was good, and the parting might be forever.

CHAPTER XXVIII

ELITHA, FRANCES, AND MR. MILLER VISIT US—­MRS. BRUNNER CLAIMS US AS HER CHILDREN—­THE DAGUERREOTYPE.

The spring-tide of 1852 was bewitchingly beautiful; hills and plain were covered with wild flowers in countless shapes and hues.  They were so friendly that they sprang up in dainty clusters close to the house doors, or wherever an inch of ground would give them foothold.

They seemed to call to me, and I looked into their bright faces, threw myself among them, and hugged as many as my arms could encircle, then laid my ear close to the ground to catch the low sound of moving leaf and stem, or of the mysterious ticking in the earth, which foretells the coming of later plants.  Sometimes in my ecstasy, I would shut my eyes and lie still for a while, then open them inquiringly, to assure myself that all my favorites were around me still, and that it was not all a day-dream.

This lovely season mellowed into the Summer which brought a most unexpected letter from our sister Frances, who had been living all these years with the family of Mr. James F. Reed, in San Jose.  Childlike, she wrote: 

I am happy, but there has not been a day since I left Sutter’s Fort that I haven’t thought of my little sisters and wanted to see them.  Hiram Miller, our guardian, says he will take me to see you soon, and Elitha is going too.

After the first few days of wondering, grandma rarely mentioned our prospective visitors, nor did she show Georgia or me the letter she herself had received from Elitha, but we re-read ours until we knew it by heart, and were filled with delightful anticipations.  We imagined that our blue-eyed sister with the golden curls would look as she did when we parted, and recalled many things that we had said and done together at the Fort.