speech, but Sally was proficient in the language of femininity, and she was not at a loss to grasp the significance of the purple calico, the beaded buckskin shirt, and the necklace of elk teeth.  The half-breed walked as a chief’s daughter to the woman at the tub, and Sally grew sick and chill despite her white skin and the gold ring that made Warren Rodney her man in the face of the law.  The dark woman held Judith proudly by the hand, as a sovereign might carry a sceptre.  Judith was her staff of office, her emblem of authority in the house of Warren Rodney.

Singing Stream held out her hands to Sally in a gesture of appeal—­and blundered.  Of the chief’s daughter, walking proudly, Sally was afraid; but a supplicating half-breed in strips of purple calico, not even hemmed, was a matter for merriment.  Sally put her hands on her hips, arms akimbo, and laughed a dry cackle.  The light in the brown woman’s eyes, as she looked at the white, was like prairie-fires rolling forward through darkness.  There was no need of a common speech between them.  The whole destiny of woman was in the laugh and the look that answered it.

And the man they could have murdered for came from the house, an unheroic figure with suspenders dangling and a corncob pipe in his mouth, sullen, angry, and withal abjectly frightened, as mere man inevitably is when he sniffs a woman’s battle in the air.  The bride, at sight of her husband, took to hysterics.  She wept, she laughed, and down tumbled her hair.  She felt the situation demanded a scene.  Rodney, with a marital brevity hardly to be expected so soon, commanded Sally to go into the house and to “shut up.”

Then he faced Singing Stream and said to her in her own language:  “You must go away from here.  The pale-faced woman is my wife by the white man’s law—­ring and Bible.  No Indian marriage about this.”

But the brown woman only pointed to Judith.  She asked Rodney had she not been a good squaw to him.

And Rodney, who at best was but a poltroon, could only repeat:  “You got to keep away from here.  It’s the white man’s law—­one squaw for one man.”

From within came the sound of Sally’s lamentation as she called for her father and brother to take her from the squaw and contamination.  Warren Rodney was a man of few words.  It had become his unpleasant duty to act, and to act quickly.  He snatched Judith from her mother and took her into the house, and he returned with his Winchester, which was not loaded, to Singing Stream.

“You got to go,” he said, and levelling the Winchester, he repeated the command.  Singing Stream looked at him with the dumb wonder of a forest thing.  “I was a good squaw to you,” she said; and did not even curse him.  And turning, she ran towards the foot-hills, with all the length of purple calico trailing.