Sally Tumlin’s pink calico gowns sowed a crop of nettles in the mind of the squaw.  It was the rainbow things, she felt, that were robbing her of her man.  All her barbaric craving for glowing colors asserted itself as a means towards the one great end of keeping him.  Singing Stream began to scheme schemes.  One day Rodney was splitting wood at the Tumlin camp—­though why he should split wood where there were two women puzzled the squaw.  But the ways of the pale-faces were beyond her ken.  She only knew that she must make herself beautiful in the eyes of Warren Rodney, like this devil woman, and then perhaps the pappoose that she expected with the first snowfall would be a man-child; and she hoped great things of this happening.

With such primitive reasoning did Singing Stream put the horses to the light wagon, and, taking the little Judith with her, drove to Deadwood, a matter of two hundred miles, to buy the bright calicoes that were to make her like a white woman.  It never occurred to the half-breed woman to make known her plans to Warren Rodney.  In circumventing Sally Tumlin the man became the spoils of war, and it is not the Indian way to tell plans on the war-trail.  So the squaw left her kingdom in the hands of the enemy, without a word.

Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney looked upon the disappearance of the squaw in the light of a providential solution of the difficulties attending their romance.  They admitted it was square of her to “hit the trail,” and they decided to lose no time in going to the army post, where a chaplain, an Indian missionary, happened to be staying at the time, and have a real wedding, with a ring and a fee to the parson.  The wedding party started for the post, old mother Tumlin fluttering about the bride as complacently as if the ceremony had been the culmination of the most decorous courtship.  The oafish brother drove the bridal party, making crude jests by-the-way, to the frank delight of the prospective groom and the giggling protestations of the bride.  The chaplain at the post was disposed to ask few questions.  Parsons made queer marriages in those tumultuous days, and it was regarded as a patent of worthy motives that the pair should call in the man of the gospel at all.  To the question whether or not he had been married before, Rodney answered: 

“Well, parson, this is the first time I have ever stood up for a life sentence.”  And the ceremony proceeded.

Some of the ladies at the post, hearing that there was to be a wedding, dropped in and added their smiles and flutterings to the rather grim party; among them, Mrs. Atkins, who had just come to the post as a bride.  They even added a trifle or two from their own store of pretty things, as presents to Sally.  And Miss Tumlin left the post Mrs. Warren Rodney, with “a home of her own” to go to.