uriosity, and, perhaps, he thought with a sad
smile, from a little sisterly jealousy of the young girl who had evinced
such an interest in him, and had known him before. He took up his pen
and continued the interrupted paragraph of his report.

"I am satisfied that much of the mischievous and extravagant prejudice
against the half breed and all alliances of the white and red
races springs from the ignorance of the frontiersman and his hasty
generalization of facts. There is no doubt that an intermixture of blood
brings out purely superficial contrasts the more strongly, and that
against the civilizing habits and even costumes of the half breed,
certain Indian defects appear the more strongly as in the case of the
color line of the quadroon and octoroon, but it must not be forgotten
that these are only the contrasts of specific improvement, and the
inference that the borrowed defects of a half breed exceed the original
defects of the full-blooded aborigine is utterly illogical." He stopped
suddenly and laid down his pen with a heightened color; the bugle had
blown, the guard was turning out to receive the commandant and his
returning party, among whom was Friddy.

*****

Through the illusions of depression and distance the "sink" of Butternut
Creek seemed only an incrustation of blackish moss on the dull gray
plain. It was not until one approached within half a mile of it that it
resolved itself into a copse of butternut-trees sunken below the distant
levels. Here once, in geological story, the waters of Butternut Creek,
despairing of ever crossing the leagues of arid waste before them, had
suddenly disappeared in the providential interposition of an area of
looser soil, and so given up the effort and the ghost forever, their
grave being marked by the butternut copse, chance-sown by bird or beast
in the saturated ground. In Indian legend the "sink" commemorated the
equally providential escape of a great tribe who, surrounded by enemies,
appealed to the Great Spirit for protection, and was promptly conveyed
by subterraneous passages to the banks of the Great River a hundred
miles away. Its outer edges were already invaded by the dust of the
plain, but within them ran cool recesses, a few openings, and the
ashes of some long-forgotten camp-fires. To-day its sombre shadows were
relieved by bright colored dresses, the jackets of the drivers of a
large sutler's wagon, whose white canvas head marked the entrance of the
cops