at the Indian girl, who was handsome and
young, younger than she.

"And look," came the voice again, "there are the emigrants."

A long column of wagons had crested the summit and was rolling down the
slope. They were in single file, hood behind hood, the drivers,
bearded as cave men, walking by the oxen. The line moved steadily,
without sound or hurry, as if directed by a single intelligence
possessed of a single idea. It was not a congeries of separated
particles, but a connected whole. As it wound down the face of the
hill, it suggested a vast Silurian monster, each wagon top a vertebra,
crawling forward with definite purpose.

"That's the way they're coming," said the voice of the strange man.
"Slow but steady, an endless line of them."

"Who?" said Susan, answering him for the first time.

"The white men. They're creeping along out of their country into this,
pushing the frontier forward every year, and going on ahead of it with
their tents and their cattle and their women. Watch the way that train
comes after Red Feather's village. That was all scattered and broken,
going every way like a lot of glass beads rolling down the hill. This
comes slow, but it's steady and sure as fate."

She thought for a moment, watching the emigrants, and then said:

"It moves like soldiers."

"Conquerors. That's what they are. They're going to roll over
everything--crush them out."

"Over the Indians?"

"That's it. Drive 'em away into the cracks of the mountains, wipe them
out the way the trappers are wiping out the beaver."

"Cruel!" she said hotly. "I don't believe it."

"Cruel?" he gave her a look of half-contemptuous amusement. "Maybe so,
but why should you blame them for that? Aren't you cruel when you kill
an antelope or a deer for supper? They're not doing you any harm, but
you just happen to be hungry. Well, those fellers are hungry--land
hungry--and they've come for the Indian's land. The whole world's
cruel. You know it, but you don't like to think so, so you say it
isn't. You're just lying because you're afraid of the truth."

She looked angrily at him and met the gray eyes. In the center of each
iris was a dot of pupil so clearly defined and hard that they looked to
Susan like the heads of black pins. "That's exactly what he'd say,"
she thought; "he's no better than a savage." What she said was:

"I don't agree with you at all."

"I don't expect you to," he answered, and making an