Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/42

 and gear and some other things; one of them was a ring which Noah Jo said went with me. Azen showed it to me then, Miss Carew; and years later, he gave it to me. Would you like to see it?"

"Please," Ethel said, that strange tug pulling at her harder. What he was saying to her was no oft-repeated or cheaply told tale, she was sure; he was bringing himself to relate these circumstances of his life only after a struggle with his pride. And she could guess how hard and bitter must have been the building of that pride by the little boy, a white boy in the Indian shack in the woods.

He took off a glove and, putting his hand inside of his coat, he felt in some secure inner pocket and took out a little chamois bag from which he drew a ring, a woman's ring, Ethel saw, when she received it. It was a small but remarkable ring of gold, without jewels but decorated in a beautiful and stately manner. It was an old ring, not marked with a date, but of a fashion which suggested a century, or two centuries, gone. Ethel could not visualize it alone upon a woman's hand; its original possessor, she thought, certainly had counted this only one among many ornaments for her slender fingers. And the image it called up caused Ethel to glance up at its present owner with new estimation which he met by color deepening upon his cheek, though his eyes met hers steadily.

"What did that mean to you?" she asked, holding it a moment longer before giving it back.

"Nothing much at first, that I remember," he said. "I was white; but for a while I went with the Indians more than with the whites. Indian boys and girls, as well as white, attended the same little schoolhouse on