And then the Tumlins came from Tennessee to the Black Hills.  They came in an ox-cart, and the days of their journey were more than two years.  They had stopped in Ohio, and again in Illinois; and, behold! neither was the promised land, the land that their excited imaginations had painted from the large talk of returning travellers, and that was further glorified through their own thriftless discontent with conditions at home.  They had travelled on and on across half a continent in the wake of a vanishing sky-line.  The vague westward impulse was luring them to California, but they waited in Dakota that their starved stock might fatten, and while they rested themselves from the long journey, Warren Rodney made the acquaintance of Sally Tumlin, who rallied him on being a “squaw man.”

Warren Rodney had almost forgotten the sorceries of the women of his people; he had lived so long with a brown woman, who spread no silken snares.  Sally’s blushes stirred a multitude of dead things—­the wiles of pale women, all strength in weakness, fragile flowers for tender handling—­ the squaw had grown as withered as a raisin.

Now, Sally Tumlin had no convictions about life but that the world owed her “a home of her own.”  Her mother had forged the bolt of this particular maxim at an early date.  And Sally saw from precocious observation that the business of women was home-getting, to which end they must be neat and sweet and sparing of speech.  After the home was forthcoming, then, indeed, might a woman take ease in slippers and wrapper, and it is surely a wife’s privilege to speak her mind.  Sally knew that she hated travelling westward after the crawling oxen; each day the sun pursued them, caught up with them, outdistanced them, and at night left them stranded in the wilderness, and rose again and mocked them on the morrow.  Her father and oafish brother loved the makeshifts of the wagon life, with its chance shots at fleeing antelope, scurrying sage-hens, and bounding cotton-tails; a chance parley with a stray Indian but added zest to the game of chance.  But Sally hated it all.  The cabin on Elder Creek had a tight roof; Warren Rodney had money in the bank.  He had had uncommon luck at trapping.  His talk to Sally was largely of his prospects.

Sally knew that the world owed her “a home of her own”; and why should she let a squaw keep her from it?  Sally’s mother giggled when consulted.  She plainly regarded the squaw as a rival of her daughter.  The ethics of the case, as far as Mrs. Tumlin was concerned, was merely a question of white skin against brown, and which should carry the day.  Singing Stream knew not one word of the talk, much of which occurred in her very presence, that threatened to pull her home about her ears, but she knew that Sally was taking her man from her.  The white-skinned woman wore white ruffles about her neck and calico dresses that were the color of the wild roses that grew among the willows at the creek.