“It will be soon.  Three weeks from to-day.”

“And at the ranch, I presume?  My uncle will see to that, of course.”

“Yes, it will be at the ranch.”

“Good!  I was wondering if anything would be doing here while I was here.”  Craig threw one leg over the pommel of his saddle and adjusted the knickerbockers comfortably.  “By the way, how do you—­your people—­celebrate an event of this kind?  I admit I’m a bit ignorant on the point.”

“Celebrate?  I don’t think I understand.”  The Easterner glanced at his companion suspiciously but the other man was still looking straight ahead into the distance.

“You have a dance, or a barbecue or—­or something of that sort, don’t you?  It’s to be an Indian wedding, is it not?”

Pat, pat went the horses’ feet on the prairie sod.  While one could count ten slowly there was no other sound.

“No, there will be no dance or barbecue or anything out of the ordinary, so far as I know,” said a low voice then.  “It will not be an Indian wedding.”

Craig hesitated.  An instinct told him he had gone far enough.  Lurking indefinite in the depths of that last low-voiced answer was a warning, a challenge to a trespasser; but something else, a thing which a lifetime of indulgence had made almost an instinct, prevented his heeding.  He was not accustomed to being denied, this man; and there was no contesting the obvious fact that now a confidence was being withheld.  The latent antagonism aroused with a bound at the thought.  Something more than mere curiosity was at stake, something which he magnified until it obscured his horizon, warped hopelessly his vision of right or wrong.  He was of the conquering Anglo-Saxon race, and this other who refused him was an Indian.  Racial supremacy itself hung in the balance:  the old, old issue of the white man and the red.  Back into the stirrup went the leg that hung over the saddle.  Involuntarily as before he stiffened.

“Why, is it not to be an Indian wedding?” he queried directly.  “You seemed a bit ago rather proud of your pedigree.”  A trace of sarcasm crept into his voice at the thinly veiled allusion.  “Have you forsaken entirely the customs of your people?”

Pat, pat again sounded the horses’ feet.  The high places as well as the low bore their frost blanket now, and the dead turf cracked softly with every step.

“No, I have not forsaken the customs of my people.”

“Why then in this instance?” insistently.  “At least be consistent, man.  Why in this single particular and no other?”

The hand on the neck of the cayuse tightened, tightened until the tiny ears of the wicked little beast went flat to its head; then of a sudden the grip loosened.

“Why?  The answer is simple.  The lady who is to be my wife is not an Indian.”