erself at
Cainsville, with the blue bluffs rising to the east of her, and the low
white stretches of the river flats undulating down to where the sluggish
stream wound its way southward capriciously.

Ninon soon tired of her trapper. For one thing she found out that he
was a coward. She saw him run once in a buffalo fight. That was when the
Pawnee stood still with a blanket stretched wide in a gaudy square,
and caught the head of the mad animal fairly in the tough fabric; his
mustang's legs trembled under him, but he did not move,--for a mustang
is the soul of an Indian, and obeys each thought; the Indian himself
felt his heart pounding at his ribs; but once with that garment fast
over the baffled eyes of the struggling brute, the rest was only a
matter of judicious knife-thrusts. Ninon saw this. She rode past her
lover, and snatched the twisted bullion cord from his hat that she had
braided and put there, and that night she tied it on the hat of the
Pawnee who had killed the buffalo.

The Pawnees were rather proud of the episode, and as for the Frenchmen,
they did not mind. The French have always been very adaptable in
America. Ninon was universally popular.

And so were her soups.

Every man has his price. Father de Smet's was the soups of Mademoiselle
Ninon. Fancy! If you have an educated palate and are obliged to eat
the strong distillation of buffalo meat, cooked in a pot which has been
wiped out with the greasy petticoat of a squaw! When Ninon came down
from St. Louis she brought with her a great box containing neither
clothes, furniture, nor trinkets, but something much more wonderful!
It was a marvellous compounding of spices and seasonings. The aromatic
liquids she set before the enchanted men of the settlement bore no more
relation to ordinary buffalo soup than Chateaubrand's Indian maidens
did to one of the Pawnee girls, who slouched about the settlement with
noxious tresses and sullen slavish coquetries.

Father de Smet would not at any time have called Ninon a scarlet woman.
But when he ate the dish of soup or tasted the hot corn-cakes that she
invariably invited him to partake of as he passed her little house, he
refrained with all the charity of a true Christian and an accomplished
epicure from even thinking her such. And he remembered the words of the
Saviour, "Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone."

To Father de Smet's healthy nature nothing seemed more superfluous than
sin.