Diane of the Green Van

For the rides over the sun-hot plains, the poling of cypress canoes, the days of hunting and the tanning of hides, there was now a third of fearless strength and endurance. Keela had come with the Mulberry Moon to the home of her foster father, a presence of delicate gravity and shyness which pervaded the lodge like the breath of some vivid wild flower.

"Red-winged Blackbird," said Carl, one morning, laying aside the flute which had been showering tranquil melody through the quiet beneath the moss-hung oaks, "why are you so quiet?"

"I am ever quiet," said Red-winged Blackbird with dignity. "Mic-co says it is better so."

"Why?"

"Mic-co only understands, and even to him I may not always talk." She went sedately on with the modeling of clay, her slender hands swift, graceful, unfaltering. Mic-co's lodge abounded in evidences of their deftness.

"You have more grace," said Carl suddenly, "than any woman I have ever known."

"Diane!" said Keela with charming and impartial acquiescence.

"Yes, Diane has it, too," assented Carl, and fell thoughtful, watching Mic-co's snowy herons flap tamely about the lodge.

"Play!" said Keela shyly.

Carl drew the flute from his pocket again and obeyed.

"Like a brook of silver!" said the Indian girl with an abashed revealment of the wild sylvan poetry with which her thoughts were rife.

"The one friend," said Carl, "to whom I have told all things. The one friend, Red-winged Blackbird, who always understood!"

"I," said Keela with majesty, "I too am your friend and I understand."

Carl reddened a little.

"What do you understand, little Indian lady?" he asked quietly.

He was totally unprepared for the keenness of her unsmiling analysis.

"That you have been very tired in the head," she nodded, her delicate, vivid face quite grave. "So tired that you might not see as you should, so tired that the medicine of white men could not reach it, but only the words of Mic-co, who knows all things. So tired that a moon was not a moon of lovely brightness. It was a thing of evil fire to scorch. Uncah? Mic-co would say warped vision. I must talk in simpler ways for all I study."

They fell quiet.

"Read me again that live oak poem of Lanier's," said Carl. "After a while Mic-co will be back to spirit you away to his Room of Books."

She read, as she frequently read to Carl and Mic-co in the long quiet afternoons, with an accent musical and soft, of the immortal marshes of Glynn.

"Glooms of the live oaks, beautiful-braided and woven With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs,--"