Me Smith

me—Susie.” What else she would have said ended in a gurgle. Her jaw dropped, and she died with her glazing eyes upon Susie’s face.
    Susie pulled the gay Indian blanket gently over her mother’s shoulders, as if afraid she would be cold. Then she slipped a needle and some beads and buckskin, to complete an unfinished moccasin, underneath the blanket. Her mother was going on a long journey, and would want occupation. There were no tears in Susie’s eyes when she replaced the bottles and the skinning knife with the discolored blade behind the mirror.
    The wan little creature seemed to have no tears to shed. She was unresponsive to Dora’s broken words of sympathy, and the grub-liners’ awkward condolences—they seemed not to reach her heart at all. She heard them without hearing, for her mind was chaos as she moved silently from room to room, or huddled, a forlorn figure, on the bench where her mother always had sat.
    Breakfast was long since over and the forenoon well advanced when she finally left the silent house and crept like the ghost of her spirited self down the path to the stable and into the roomy stall where her stout little cow-pony stood munching hay.
    In her sorrow, the dumb animal was the one thing to which she turned. He lifted his head when she went in, and threw his cropped ears forward, while his eyes grew limpid as a horse’s eyes will at the approach of some one it knows well and looks to for food and affection.
    They had almost grown up together, and the time Susie had spent on his back, or with him in the corral or stall, formerly had been half her waking hours. They had no fear of each other; only deep love and mutual understanding.
    “Oh, Croppy! Croppy!” her childish voice quavered. “Oh, Croppy, you’re all I’ve got left!” She slipped her arms around his thick neck and hid her face in his mane.
    He stopped eating and stood motionless while she clung to him, his ears alert at the sound of the familiar voice.
    “What shall I do!” she wailed in an abandonment of grief.
    In her inexperience, it seemed to Susie, that with her mother’s death all the world had come to an end for her. Undemonstrative as they were, and meagre as had been any spoken words of affection, the bond of natural love between them had seemed strong and unbreakable until Smith’s coming. They had been all in all to each other in their unemotional way; and now this unexpected tragedy seemed to crush the child, because it was something which never had entered her thoughts. It was a crisis with which she did not know how to cope or to bear. The world could never be blacker for her than it was when she clung sobbing to the little sorrel pony’s thick neck that morning. The future looked utterly cheerless and impossible to endure. She had not learned that no tragedy is so blighting that there is not a way out—a way which the sufferer makes himself, which comes to him, or into which he is forced. Nothing stays as it is. But it appeared to Susie that life could never be different, except to be worse.
    She had talked much to McArthur of the outside world, and questioned him, and a doubt had sprung up as to the feasibility of searching for her kinsfolk, as she had planned. There were many, many trails and wire fences to bewilder one, and people—hundreds of people—people who were not always kind. His answers filled her with vague fears. To be only sixteen, and alone, is cause enough for tears, and Susie shed them now.
    McArthur, with a radiant face, was riding toward the ranch to which he had become singularly attached. His saddle-pockets bulged with mail, and his elbows flapped joyously as he urged his horse to greater speed. He looked up eagerly at the house as he crossed the ford, and his kind eyes shone with happiness when he rode into the stable-yard and swung out of the saddle.
    He heard a sound, the unmistakable sound of sobbing, as he was unsaddling. Listening, he knew it came from somewhere in the stable, so he left his horse and went inside.
    It was Susie, as he had thought. She lifted her tear-stained face from the pony’s mane when he spoke, and he knew that she was glad to see him.
    “Oh, pardner, I thought you’d never come!”
    “The mail was late, and I stayed with the Major to wait for it. What has gone wrong?”
    “Mother’s dead,” she said. “She was poisoned accidentally.”
    “Susie! And there was no one here?” The news seemed incredible.
    “Only Teacher and me—no one