His hair was chestnut-brown, glinting in the candle-light to gold, and the hint of waviness in it explained the perceptible droop to his tawny moustache.  For the rest, his face was clean-shaven and cut on a good masculine pattern.  At first she found fault with the more than slight cheek-hollows under the cheek-bones, but when she measured his well-knit, slenderly muscular figure, with its deep chest and heavy shoulders, she discovered that she preferred the hollows; at least they did not imply lack of nutrition.  The body gave the lie to that; while they themselves denied the vice of over-feeding.  Height, five feet, nine, she summed up from out of her gymnasium experience; and age anywhere between twenty-five and thirty, though nearer the former most likely.

“Haven’t many blankets,” he said abruptly, pausing to drain his cup and set it over on the grub-box.  “I don’t expect my Indians back from Lake Linderman till morning, and the beggars have packed over everything except a few sacks of flour and the bare camp outfit.  However, I’ve a couple of heavy ulsters which will serve just as well.”

He turned his back, as though he did not expect a reply, and untied a rubber-covered roll of blankets.  Then he drew the two ulsters from a clothes-bag and threw them down on the bedding.

“Vaudeville artist, I suppose?”

He asked the question seemingly without interest, as though to keep the conversation going, and, in fact, as if he knew the stereotyped answer beforehand.  But to Frona the question was like a blow in the face.  She remembered Neepoosa’s philippic against the white women who were coming into the land, and realized the falseness of her position and the way in which he looked upon her.

But he went on before she could speak.  “Last night I had two vaudeville queens, and three the night before.  Only there was more bedding then.  It’s unfortunate, isn’t it, the aptitude they display in getting lost from their outfits?  Yet somehow I have failed to find any lost outfits so far.  And they are all queens, it seems.  No under-studies or minor turns about them,—­no, no.  And I presume you are a queen, too?”

The too-ready blood sprayed her cheek, and this made her angrier than did he; for whereas she was sure of the steady grip she had on herself, her flushed face betokened a confusion which did not really possess her.

“No,” she answered, coolly; “I am not a vaudeville artist.”

He tossed several sacks of flour to one side of the stove, without replying, and made of them the foundation of a bed; and with the remaining sacks he duplicated the operation on the opposite side of the stove.

“But you are some kind of an artist, then,” he insisted when he had finished, with an open contempt on the “artist.”

“Unfortunately, I am not any kind of an artist at all.”

He dropped the blanket he was folding and straightened his back.  Hitherto he had no more than glanced at her; but now he scrutinized her carefully, every inch of her, from head to heel and back again, the cut of her garments and the very way she did her hair.  And he took his time about it.