The Sun Maid: A Story of Fort Dearborn

“They look as pure as some them Sisters of Charity I’ve seen in Boston city. And they won’t spare themselves no more, neither. Poor Gaspar boy! How’ll he ever stand it without his Kit, and if – ah, if – she should catch – Oh, my soul! oh – my – soul! I wonder if he’s takin’ it terrible hard!”

But though she brought her body back to a normal poise, her morbid curiosity was doomed to disappointment, for Tempest had already borne his master out of sight at a mad pace across the prairie.

The enemy which had come with the infantry over the great water was the most terrible known, – a disease so dread and devastating that men turned pale at the mere mention of its name – the Asiatic cholera.

When it appeared, the garrison was crowded with the settlers who had fled before the anticipated attacks of the Indians and, as has been said, every roof in the community sheltered all it could cover. But when the soldiers began to die by dozens and scores the refugees were terrified. Death by the hand of the red man was possible, even probable; but death of the pestilence was certain.

The town was now emptied far more rapidly than it had filled; and early in this new disaster Gaspar had hastened to the old clearing of the Smiths and had made Osceolo, aided by a few more frightened, willing men, toil with himself to erect wigwams enough to accommodate many persons. He had then returned for his household and had been met by his wife’s first resistance to his will.

“No, Gaspar, I cannot go. I have no fear. I am perfectly ‘sound.’ Probably no healthier woman ever lived than I am. I have learned much of nursing from Wahneenah, and my place, my duty, is here. I cannot go.”

“Kit! my Kitty! Are you beside yourself? Where is your duty, if not to me and to our children?”

“Here, my husband, right here; in our beloved town, among the lonely strangers who have come to save it from destruction and have laid their lives at our feet.”

“That is sheer nonsense. Your life is at stake.”

“Is my life more precious than theirs?”

“Yes. Infinitely so. It is mine.”

“It is God’s – and humanity’s – first, Gaspar.”

“Your children, then; if you scorn my wishes.”

“Don’t make it hard for me, beloved; harder than God Himself has made it. Do you take Mother Mercy and Abel and go to the place you have prepared. The children will be as safe with her as with me; safer, for she will watch them constantly, while I believe in leaving them to grow by themselves. Between them and us you may come and go – up to a certain point; but not to the peril of your taking the disease. The Indians are no less on the war-path because the cholera has come. Your duty is afield, guarding, watching, preventing all the evil that a wise man can. Mine is here, using the skill I have learned from Wahneenah and faithfully at her side.”

“Wahneenah? Does she wish to stay too; to nurse the pale-faces, the men who have come here to fight her own race?”

“Yes, Gaspar, she is just so noble. Can I do less? I, with my education, which the dear Doctor has given me, and my youth, my perfect health, my entire fearlessness. You forget, sweetheart; I am the Unafraid. Never more unafraid than now, never more sure that we will come out of this trouble as we have come out of every other. Why, dear, don’t you remember old Katasha and her prophecy? I am to be great and rich and beneficent. I am to be the helper of many people. Well, then, since I am not great, and rich only through you, let me begin at the last end of the prophecy, and be beneficent. Wait; even now there is somebody coming toward us asking me for help.”

“Kit, I can’t have it. I won’t. You are my wife. You shall obey me. You shall stop talking nonsense. You may as well understand. Pick together what duds you need and let’s get off as soon as possible. Every hour here is fresh danger. Come. Please hurry.”

But she did not hurry, not in the least. Indeed, had she followed her heart wholly, she would never have hastened one degree toward the end she had elected. But she followed it only in part; so she stole quietly up to where the man fumed and flustered and clasped her arms about his neck and laid her beautiful face against his own.

“Love: this is not our first separation, nor our longest. Many a month have you been away from me, up there in the north, getting money and more money, till I hated its very name, – only that I knew we could use it for others. In that, and in most things, I will obey you as I have. In this I must obey the voice of God. Life is better than money, and to save life or to comfort death is the price of this, our last separation.”

After that he said no more; but recognizing the nobility of her effort, even though he still felt it mistaken, and with a credulous remembrance of Katasha’s saying, he made her preparations and his own without delay and parted from her as has been told.

“Well, my dear Other Mother, there is one thing to comfort! Hard as it was to see them all go, we shall have no time to brood. And we shall be together. Let us get on now to our work. There were five new cases this morning; and time flies! Oh, if I were wiser and knew better what to do for such a sickness! The best we can – that’s all.”

“What the Great Spirit puts into our hands, that we can always lift,” replied Wahneenah, and, with her arm still about her darling’s waist, they walked together Fortward. It may be that in the Indian’s jealous, if devoted, heart there was just a tinge of thankfulness for even an evil so dire, since it gave her back her “White Papoose” quite to herself again.

“Well, I can watch her all I choose, and no burden shall fall to her share that I can spare her. The easy part – the watching and the soothing and the Bible reading – that shall be hers. Mine will be the coarsest tasks,” she thought, and – as Gaspar had done – reckoned without her host.

“It is turn and turn about, Other Mother, or I will drive you out of the place,” Kitty declared; and after a few useless struggles, which merely wasted the time that should have been given their patients, it was so settled; and so continued during the dreadful weeks that followed.

Until just before midsummer the nurses were almost wholly at the Fort, where it seemed to Kitty that a “fresh case” and a “burial” alternated with the regularity of a pendulum; and then a little relief was gained by taking their sick across to Agency House and its ampler accommodations. But even these were meagre compared to the needs; and more and more as the days went by did the Sun Maid long for greater wisdom.

“That is one of the things Gaspar and I must do. We must have a regular hospital, such as are in Eastern cities; and there must be men and women taught to understand all sorts of diseases and how to care for them. I know so little – so little.”

But experience taught more than schools could have done; and many a poor fellow who had come from a far-away home sank to his last rest with greater confidence because of the ministrations of these two devoted women. And at last, very suddenly, there appeared one among them whom both Wahneenah and her daughter recognized with a sinking heart.

“Doctor! Oh, Doctor Littlejohn! I thought you were safe at the ‘Refuge’ with Mercy and Abel. How came you here? and why? You must go away at once. You must, indeed. Where is the horse you rode?”

“I rode no horse, my dear. If I had asked for one, I should have been prevented, – even forcibly, I fear. So I walked.”

“Walked? In this heat, all that distance? Will you tell me why?”

But already, before it was spoken, the Sun Maid guessed the answer.

“Because, at length, through all the shifting talk about me, it penetrated to my study-dulled brain that there was a need more urgent than that the Indian dialects should be preserved; that I, a minister of the gospel, was letting a woman take the duty, the privilege, that was mine. I have come, daughter of my old age, to encourage the sufferers you relieve and bury the dead you cannot save.”

“But – for you, in your feebleness – ”

He held up his thin white hand that trembled as an aspen leaf.

“It is enough, my dear. Consider all is said. I heard a fresh groan just then. Somebody needs you – or me.”

Wahneenah now had two to watch, and she did it jealously, at the cost of the slight rest she had heretofore allowed herself. The result of overstrain, in the midst of such infection, was inevitable. One evening she crept languidly toward the empty house which had been her darling’s home and behind which still stood her own deserted lodge. She was a little wearier than usual, she thought, but that was all. To lie down on her bed of boughs and draw her own old blanket over her would make her sleep. She longed to sleep – just for a minute; to shut out from her eyes and her thoughts the scenes through which she had gone. How long ago was it since the wagon and the fair-haired babies went away?

She was a little confused. She was falling asleep, though, despite the agony that tortured her. Her? She had always hated pain and despised it. It couldn’t be Wahneenah, the Happy, crouching thus, in a cramped and becrippled attitude. It was some other woman, – some woman she had used to know.

Why, there was her warrior: her own! And the son she had lost! And now – what was this in the parting of the tent curtains? The moonlight made mortal?

No. Not a moon-born but a sun-born maiden she, who stooped till her white garments swept the earth and her beautiful, loving face was close, close. Even the glazing eyes could see how wondrously fair it was in the sight of men and spirits. Even the dulled ears could catch that agonized cry:

“Wahneenah! Wahneenah! My Mother! Bravest and noblest! and yet – a savage!”

“Who called her so knew not of what he spake. From one God we all came and unto Him we must return. Blessed be His Name!” answered the clergyman who had followed.

Then the frail man, who had so little strength for himself, was given power to lift the broken-hearted Maid and carry her away into a place of safety.

CHAPTER XXII.

GROWING UP

“Well, I’m beat! I don’t know what to do with myself. Out there to the clearing I was just crazy wild to get back to town; and now I’m here I’m nigh dead with plumb lonesomeness. My, my, my! Indians licked out of their skins, about, and cleared out the whole endurin’ State. Old Black Hawk marched off to the East to be shown what kind of a nation he’d bucked up against, the simpleton! And Osceolo takin’ himself and his pranks, with his tribe, clear beyond the Mississippi; an’ me an’ ma lived through watchin’ them little tackers of Kit’s – oh, hum! I’d ought to take some rest; but somehow I ’low I can’t seem to.”

Mercy looked up from the unbleached sheet she was hemming and smiled grimly.

“Give it up, pa. Give it up. I’ve been a-studyin’ this question, top and bottom crust and through the inside stuffin’, and I sum it this way: It’s in the soil!”

“What’s in the soil? The shakes? or the homesickness when a feller’s right to home? or what in the land do you mean?”

“The restlessness. The something that gets inside your mind and keeps you movin’. I’ve noticed it in everybody ever come here. Must be doin’; can’t keep still; up an’ at it, till a body’s clean wore an’ beat out. Me, for one. Here I’ve no more need to hem sheets than I have to make myself a pink satin gown, which I never had nor hope to have even – ”

“The idee! I should hope not, indeed. You in a pink satin gown, ma; ’twould be scandalous!”

“Didn’t I say I wasn’t thinkin’ of gettin’ one, even so be I could, in this hole in the mud? I was talkin’ about Chicago. It ain’t a town to brag of, seein’ there ain’t two hundred left in it after the ravagin’ of the cholera; an’ yet I don’t know ary creature, man, woman, or child, ain’t goin’ to plannin’ right away for something to be done. I’ve heard more talk of improvements and hospitals and schools an’ colleges and land knows what more truck an’ dicker – Pshaw! It takes my breath away.”

“It does mine, ma.”

“Well, —that’s Chicago! You can always tell by a child when it’s a baby what it’s goin’ to be when it’s a man. Chicago’s a baby now, an’ a mighty puny one, too; but it’s kickin’ like a good feller, an’ it’s gettin’ strong; an’, first you know, folks will be pourin’ in here faster ’n the Indians or cholera carried ’em off, ary one.”

“Them ain’t your own idees; they’re Gaspar’s and Kit’s. He’s gone right to work, an’ so has she; layin’ out buildin’ sites an’ sendin’ East for any poor man that’s had hard luck and wants to begin all over again. Say – do you know – I – believe – that our Gaspar writes for the newspapers. Our Gaspar, ma! Newspapers! Out East!”

“Well, I don’t know why he shouldn’t. Didn’t I raise him?”

“Where do I come in, Mercy?”

“Wherever you can catch on, Abel. The best place I can see for you to take hold is to start in an’ build a new tavern, – a tavern big enough to swing a cat in. Then I’ll have a place to keep my sheets an’ it’ll pay me to go and make ’em.”

“How’d you know what was in my mind, Mercy?”

“Easy enough. Ain’t I been makin’ stirabout for you these forty years? Don’t I know the size of your appetite? Can’t I cal’late the size of your mind the same way? Why, Abel, I can tell by the way you brush your wisps – ”

“Ma, I’ll send East an’ buy me a wig. I ’low when a man’s few hairs can tattle his inside thoughts to the neighbors, it’s time I took a stand.”

“Well, I think you might ’s well. I think you’d look real becomin’ in a wig. I’d get it red and curly if I was you; and you’d ought to wear a bosomed shirt every day. You really had.”

“Mercy Smith! Are you out your head?”

“No. But when a man’s the first tavern-keeper in this risin’ town he ought to dress to fit his station. I always did like you best in your dickeys.”

“Shucks! I’ll wear one every day.”

“I’m goin’ to give up homespun. Calico’s a sight prettier an’ we can afford it. We’re real forehanded now, Abel.”

“Hello! Here comes Kit. Let’s ask her about the tavern. She’s got more sense in her little finger than most folks have in their whole bodies. She’s a different woman than she was before Wahneeny died. I shall always be glad you an’ her was reconciled when you parted. Hum, hum. Poor Wahneeny! Poor old Doctor! Well, it can’t be very hard to die when folks are as good as they was. Right in the line of duty, too.”

“Yes, Abel; but all the same I’m satisfied to think our duty laid out in the woods, takin’ care Kit’s children, ’stead of here amongst the sickness. Wonderful, ain’t it, how our girl came through?”

“She’ll come through anything, Sunny Maid will; right straight through this open door into her old Father Abel’s arms, eh? Well, my dear, what’s the good word? How’s Gaspar and the youngsters?”

“Well, of course. We are never ill; but, Mother Mercy, I heard you were feeling as if you hadn’t enough to do. I came in to see about that. It’s a state of things will never answer for our Chicago, where there is more to be done than people to do it. Didn’t you say you had a brother out East who was a miller?”

“Yes, of course. Made money hand over fist. He’s smarter ’n chain lightning, Ebenezer is, if I do say it as hadn’t ought to, bein’ I’m his sister.”

“Well, I’d like his address. Gaspar wants him here. We must have mills. The idea of our using hand-mills and such expedients to get our flour and meal is absurd for these days.”

“Pshaw, Kit! ’Tain’t long since I had to ride as far as fifty miles to get my grist ground, and when I got there there’d be so many before me, I’d have to wait all night sometimes. ‘First come first served’ is a miller’s saying, and they did feel proud of the row of wagons would be hitched alongside their places. I – ”

“Come, Abel, don’t reminisce. If there’s one thing more tryin’ to a body’s patience than another, it’s hearin’ about these everlastin’ has-beens.”

Abel threw back his head and laughed till the room rang.

“Hear her, my girl! Just hear her! That’s ma! That’s Mercy! She’s caught the fever, or whatever ’tis, that ails this town. She’s got no more time to hark back. It’s always get up and go ahead. What you think? She’s advising me to build a new tavern. Me! Mercy advising it! What do you think of that?”

“That it’s a capital idea. We shall need it. We shall need more than one tavern if all goes well. And it will. Now that the Indians are gone forever,” – here Kitty breathed a gentle sigh, – “the white people are no longer afraid. They have heard of our wonderful country and our wonderful location, – right in the heart of the continent, with room on every side to spread and grow eternally, indefinitely.”

“Kitty, I sometimes think you an’ Gaspar are a little off on the subject of your native town; for ’twasn’t his’n; seein’ what a collection of disreputable old houses an’ mud holes an’ sloughs of despond there’s right in plain sight. But you seem to think something’s bound to happen and you two’ll be in the midst of it.”

The Sun Maid laughed, as merrily as in the old days, and answered promptly:

“I’ve never found any sloughs of despond and something is bound to happen. Katasha’s dreams, or prophecies, whichever they were, are to come true. There is something in the very air of our lake-bordered, wind-swept prairie that attracts and exhilarates, and binds. That’s it, —binds. Once a dweller here by this great water, a man is bound to return to it if he lives. Those soldiers who have gone away from us, a mere handful, so to speak, will spread the story of our beautiful land and will come again – a legion. It is our dream that this little pestilence-visited hamlet will one day be one of the marvels of the world; that to it will assemble people from all the nations, to whom it will be an asylum, a home, and a treasure-house for every sort of wealth and wisdom. In my fancies I can see them coming, crowding, hastening; as in reality I shall some day see them, and not far off. And in the name of all that is young and strong and glorious – I bid them welcome!”

She stood in the open doorway and the sunlight streamed through it, irradiating her wonderful beauty. The two old people, types of the past, regarded her transfigured countenance with feelings not unmixed with awe, and after a moment Abel spoke:

“Well, well, well! Kitty, my girl. Hum, hum! You yourself seem all them things you say. Trouble you’ve had, an’ sorrow; the sickness an’ Wahneeny; an’ growin’ up, an’ love affairs; an’ motherhood, an’ all; yet there you be, the youngest, the prettiest, the hopefullest, the courageousest creature the Lord ever made. What is it, child; what is it makes you so different from other folks?”

“Am I different, dear? Well, Mother Mercy, yonder, is looking mystified and troubled. She doesn’t half like my prophetic moods, I know. I merely came, for Gaspar, to inquire about the miller. But I like your own idea of the new tavern, and you should begin it right away. Gaspar will lend you the money if you need it; and if you have time for more sheets than these, Mercy dear, I’ll send you over some pieces of finer muslin and you might begin on a lot for our hospital.”

“Your hospital? ’Tain’t even begun nor planned.”

“Oh, yes, it is planned. From my own experience and from books I can guess what we will need. But there are doctors and nurses coming after a time – There, there, dear. I will stop. I won’t look ahead another step while I’m here. But – it’s coming – all of it!” she finished gayly, as she turned from the doorway and passed down the forlorn little street.

Was it “in the air,” as the Sun Maid protested, that indomitable courage and faith to do and dare, to plan, to begin, and to achieve? Certain it is that in five years from that morning when Kitty Keith had lingered in Mercy’s doorway foretelling the future some, at least, of her prophecies had materialized. Where then had been but two hundred citizens were now more than twenty times that number. The “crowding” had begun; and there followed years upon years of wonderful growth; wherein Gaspar’s cool head and shrewd business tact and ever-deepening purse were always to the fore, at the demand of all who needed either. In an unswerving singleness of purpose, he devoted his energy and his ambition toward making his beloved home, as far as in him lay, the leading home and mart of all the civilized world.

And the Sun Maid walked steadfastly by his side, adding to his efforts and ambitions the sympathy of her great heart and cultured, ever-broadening womanhood.

Thus passed almost a quarter-century of years so full and peaceful that nothing can be written of them save the one word – happy. Yet at the end of this long time, wherein Abel and Mercy had quietly fallen on sleep and “Kit’s little tackers” had grown up to be themselves fathers and mothers, the Sun Maid’s joy was rudely broken.

Not only hers, but many another’s; for a drumbeat echoed through the land, and the sound was as a death-knell.

Kitty looked into her husband’s face and shivered. For the first time in all his memory of her the Unafraid grew timid.

“Oh, Gaspar! War? Civil War! A family quarrel, of all quarrels the most bitter and deadly. God help us!”

CHAPTER XXIII.

HEROES

The Sun Maid’s gaze into her husband’s face was a prolonged and questioning one. Before it was withdrawn she had found her answer.

There was still a silence between them, which she broke at last, and it touched him to see how pale she had become and yet how calm.

“You are going, Gaspar?”

“Yes, my love; I am going. Already I have pledged my word, as my arm and my purse.”

“But, my dear, do you consider? We are growing old, even we, who have never yet had time to realize it – till now. There are younger men, plenty of them. Your counsels at home – ”

“Would be empty words as compared to my example in the field. The young of heart are never old. Besides, do you remember that once, against my stubborn will, you resisted for duty’s sake? We have never regretted it, not for a day. More than that, when our first-born came to us, do you remember how we clasped his tiny hand and resolved always to lead it onward to the right? Lead it, sweetheart. We vowed never to say to him: ‘Go!’ to this or that high duty; but rather, still holding fast to him, say: ‘Come.’ There is such a wide, wide difference between the two.”

Then, indeed, again she trembled. The mother love shook her visibly and a secret rejoicing died a sudden death.

“‘Come,’ you say. But they are not here, in our own unhappy land. Gaspar in Europe, Winthrop in South America, and Hugh in Japan. They are better so.”

“Are they better there? You will be the first to say ‘no’ when this shock passes. A telegram will summon each as easily as we could call them from that other room – supposing that they, your sons, wait for the call. But they’ll not. I know them and trust them. They are already on the railways and steamships that will bring them fastest; and it will truly be the ‘Come with me!’ that we elected, for we shall all march together.”

So they did; and it was the Sun Maid herself, standing proudly among her daughters and daughters-in-law, yet more beautiful than any, who fastened the last glittering button over each manly breast and flicked away an imaginary mote from the spotless uniforms. Then she stood aside and let them go; two by two, “step,” “step” – as if in echo to the first sound which had greeted her own baby ear.

But as they passed out of sight, transgressing military discipline Gaspar turned; and once more the black eyes and the blue read in each other’s depths the unfathomable love that filled them. Then he was gone and the younger Gaspar’s wife lifted to her own aching bosom the form that had sunk unconscious at her feet. For the too prescient heart of the Sun Maid had pierced the future and she knew what would befall her.

Yet before the gray shadow had quite left her face she rallied and again smiled into the anxious countenances bending over her.

“Now, my dears, how foolish I was and how wasteful of precious time! There is so much to be done for them and for ourselves. Gaspar’s business must not suffer, nor Son’s (as she always called her eldest), nor his brothers’. There are new hospitals to equip and nurses to secure. Alas! there should be a Home made ready, even so soon, for the widows and orphans of our soldiers. Let us organize into a regular band of workers; just ourselves, as systematically as your father has trained us to believe is best. There are six of us, a little army of supplies and reinforcements. Though, Honoria, my daughter, shall I count upon you?”