sail, or compass.

Judith was now eight-and-twenty, and a sculptor would have found a hundred
statues in her. Long of limb, deep-bosomed, youth and health radiated from
her as sparks fly upward. In sunlight, her black hair had the bluish
iridescence of a ripe plum. The eyes were deep and questioning--the eyes of
a young seraph whose wings had not yet brushed the far distant heights of
paradise. Again, in her pagan gladness of living, she might have been a
Valkyr come down from Valhalla on a shooting-star. And yet, in this
wilderness that was famishing for woman's love and tears and laughter, by
a very perversity of fate she walked alone.

She was a true daughter of the desert, the child of stark, unlovely
circumstance. No well-bred romance of book and bells and churchly
benediction had ushered her into being. Her maternal grandfather had been
the famous Sioux chief, Flying Hawk; her grandmother, a white woman, who
knew no word of her people's tongue, nor yet her name or race. The Indians
found the white baby sleeping by her dead mother after the massacre of an
emigrant train. They took her with them and she grew up, in the Black Hill
country, a white-skinned Sioux, marrying a chief of the people that had
slain her people. She accepted her squaw's portion uncomplainingly; slaved
cheerfully at squaw's work while her brave made war on the whites, hunted,
and smoked. She reared her half-breed children in the legends of their
father's people, and died, a withered crone, cursing the pale-faces who
had robbed the Sioux of the buffalo and their hunting-ground.

Her daughter, Singing Stream, who knew no word of English, but who could
do better bead-work than any squaw in the tribe, went to live with Warren
Rodney when he finished his cabin on Elder Creek. That was before the gold
fever reached the Black Hills, and Rodney built the cabin that he might
fish and hunt and forget the East and why he left it. There were reasons
why he wanted to forget his identity as a white man in his play at being
an Indian. In the first flare of youth and the joy of having come into her
woman's kingdom, the half-breed squaw was pretty; she was proud, too, of
her white man, the house he had built her, and the girl pappoose with blue
eyes. Furthermore, she had been taught to serve man meekly, for he was the
lord of creation.

Rodney talked Sioux to her. He had all but forgotten he was a white man.
The girl pappoose ran about the cabin, brown and ba