tablecloths, and used a knife and fork, since he was born; and the women
of his people had had soft petticoats and fine stockings, and silk gowns
for festal days, and feathered hats of velvet, and shoes of polished
leather, always and always, back through many generations. She had held
her head high, for she was of his women, of the women of his people, with
all their rights and all their claims. She had held it high till that
stormy day--just such a day as this, with the surf of snow breaking
against the house--when they carried him in out of the wild turmoil and
snow, laying him on the couch where she now sat, and her head fell on his
lifeless breast, and she cried out to him in vain to come back to her.

Before the world her head was still held high, but in the attic-room, and
out on the prairies far away, where only the coyote or the prairie hen
saw, her head drooped, and her eyes grew heavy with pain and sombre
protest. Once in an agony of loneliness, and cruelly hurt by a conspicuous
slight put upon her at the Portage by the wife of the Reeve of the town,
who had daughters twain of pure white blood got from behind the bar of a
saloon in Winnipeg, she had thrown open her window at night, with the
frost below zero, and stood in her thin nightdress, craving the death
which she hoped the cold would give her soon. It had not availed, however,
and once again she had ridden out in a blizzard to die, but had come upon
a man lost in the snow, and her own misery had passed from her, and her
heart, full of the blood of plainsmen, had done for another what it would
not do for itself. The Indian in her had, with strange, sure instinct,
found its way to Portage la Drome, the man, with both hands and one foot
frozen, on her pony, she walking at his side, only conscious that she had
saved one, not two lives that day.

Here was another such day, here again was the storm in her heart which had
driven her into the plains that other time, and here again was that
tempest of white death outside.

_"You have no sense. You are not white. They will not have you. Sit
down_--" The words had fallen on her ears with a cold, deadly smother.
There came a chill upon her which stilled the wild pulses in her, which
suddenly robbed the eyes of their brightness and gave a drawn look to the
face.

"You are not white. They will not have you, Pauline." The Indian mother
repeated the words after a moment, her eyes grown still more gloomy; for
in her