south. A hard winter is coming quick. You will
be alone. Breaking Rock is rich. He has five hundred horses. Your man is
going to his own people. Let him go. He is no man. It is four years, and
still there are but two in your lodge. How!"

He swung on his heel with a chuckle in his throat, for he thought he had
said a good thing, and that in truth he was worth twenty white men. His
quick ear caught a movement behind him, however, and he saw the girl
spring from the lodge-door, something flashing from her belt. But now the
mother's arms were round her, with cries of protest, and Breaking Rock,
with another laugh, slipped away softly toward the river.

"That is good," he muttered. "She will kill him, perhaps, when she goes to
him. She will go, but he will not stay. I have heard."

As he disappeared among the trees, Mitiahwe disengaged herself from her
mother's arms, went slowly back into the lodge, and sat down on the great
couch where for so many moons she had lain with her man beside her.

Her mother watched her closely, though she moved about doing little
things. She was trying to think what she would have done if such a thing
had happened to her, if her man had been going to leave her. She assumed
that Dingan would leave Mitiahwe, for he would hear the voices of his
people calling far away, even as the red man who went East into the great
cities heard the prairies and the mountains and the rivers and his own
people calling, and came back, and put off the clothes of civilization,
and donned his buckskins again, and sat in the Medicine Man's tent, and
heard the spirits speak to him through the mist and smoke of the sacred
fire. When Swift Wing first gave her daughter to the white man she foresaw
the danger now at hand, but this was the tribute of the lower race to the
higher, and--who could tell? White men had left their Indian wives, but
had come back again, and forever renounced the life of their own nations,
and become great chiefs, teaching useful things to their adopted people,
bringing up their children as tribesmen--bringing up their children! There
it was, the thing which called them back, the bright-eyed children, with
the color of the brown prairie in their faces, and their brains so sharp
and strong. But here was no child to call Dingan back, only the eloquent,
brave, sweet face of Mitiahwe..... If he went! Would he go? Was he going?
And now that Mitiahwe had been told that he would go, what would she do?
In