Judith was now eight-and-twenty, and a sculptor would have found a hundred statues in her.  Long of limb, deep-bosomed, youth and health radiated from her as sparks fly upward.  In sunlight, her black hair had the bluish iridescence of a ripe plum.  The eyes were deep and questioning—­the eyes of a young seraph whose wings had not yet brushed the far distant heights of paradise.  Again, in her pagan gladness of living, she might have been a Valkyr come down from Valhalla on a shooting-star.  And yet, in this wilderness that was famishing for woman’s love and tears and laughter, by a very perversity of fate she walked alone.

She was a true daughter of the desert, the child of stark, unlovely circumstance.  No well-bred romance of book and bells and churchly benediction had ushered her into being.  Her maternal grandfather had been the famous Sioux chief, Flying Hawk; her grandmother, a white woman, who knew no word of her people’s tongue, nor yet her name or race.  The Indians found the white baby sleeping by her dead mother after the massacre of an emigrant train.  They took her with them and she grew up, in the Black Hill country, a white-skinned Sioux, marrying a chief of the people that had slain her people.  She accepted her squaw’s portion uncomplainingly; slaved cheerfully at squaw’s work while her brave made war on the whites, hunted, and smoked.  She reared her half-breed children in the legends of their father’s people, and died, a withered crone, cursing the pale-faces who had robbed the Sioux of the buffalo and their hunting-ground.

Her daughter, Singing Stream, who knew no word of English, but who could do better bead-work than any squaw in the tribe, went to live with Warren Rodney when he finished his cabin on Elder Creek.  That was before the gold fever reached the Black Hills, and Rodney built the cabin that he might fish and hunt and forget the East and why he left it.  There were reasons why he wanted to forget his identity as a white man in his play at being an Indian.  In the first flare of youth and the joy of having come into her woman’s kingdom, the half-breed squaw was pretty; she was proud, too, of her white man, the house he had built her, and the girl pappoose with blue eyes.  Furthermore, she had been taught to serve man meekly, for he was the lord of creation.

Rodney talked Sioux to her.  He had all but forgotten he was a white man.  The girl pappoose ran about the cabin, brown and bare, but for the bead jacket Singing Stream had made for her in the pride of her maternity.  Rodney called the little girl “Judith.”  Her Indian mother never guessed the significance of the strange name that she could not say, but made at least ten soft singing syllables of, in the Indian way.  The little Judith greeted her father in strange lispings; Warren Rodney was far from unhappy in playing at primitive man.  This recessional into conditions primeval endured for “seven snows,” as the Indian tongue hath it.  Then the squaw began to break, after the manner of the women of her father’s people.  She had begun her race with time a decade after Warren Rodney, and she had outdistanced him by a decade.