_Who calls?_)

"But I'm white; I'm not an Indian. My father was a white man. I've been
brought up as a white girl. I've had a white girl's schooling."

Her eyes flashed as she sprang to her feet and walked up and down the room
for a moment, then stood still, facing her mother--a dark-faced,
pock-marked woman, with heavy, somnolent eyes--and waited for her to
speak. The reply came slowly and sullenly:

"I am a Blackfoot woman. I lived on the Muskwat River among the braves for
thirty years. I have killed buffalo. I have seen battles. Men, too, I have
killed when they came to steal our horses and crept in on our lodges in
the night--the Crees! I am a Blackfoot. You are the daughter of a
Blackfoot woman. No medicine can cure that. Sit down. You have no sense.
You are not white. They will not have you. Sit down."

The girl's handsome face flushed; she threw up her hands in an agony of
protest. A dreadful anger was in her panting breast, but she could not
speak. She seemed to choke with excess of feeling. For an instant she
stood still, trembling with agitation, then she sat down suddenly on a
great couch covered with soft deer-skins and buffalo robes. There was deep
in her the habit of obedience to this sombre but striking woman. She had
been ruled firmly, almost oppressively, and she had not yet revolted.
Seated on the couch, she gazed out of the window at the flying snow, her
brain too much on fire for thought, passion beating like a pulse in all
her lithe and graceful young body, which had known the storms of life and
time for only twenty years.

The wind shrieked and the snow swept past in clouds of blinding drift,
completely hiding from sight the town below them, whose civilization had
built itself many habitations and was making roads and streets on the
green-brown plain, where herds of buffalo had stamped and streamed and
thundered not long ago. The town was a mile and a half away, and these two
were alone in a great circle of storm, one of them battling against a
tempest which might yet overtake her, against which she had set her face
ever since she could remember; though it had only come to violence since
her father died two years before--a careless, strong, wilful white man,
who had lived the Indian life for many years, but had been swallowed at
last by the great wave of civilization streaming westward and northward,
wiping out the game and the Indian, and overwhelming the rough, fighting,
hunting, pioneer life