coffee pot and shook it upside down, driblets of
coffee running out. With her other hand she brushed the tears off her
cheeks.

"Don't stand there as if you never saw a girl cry before," she said,
savagely. "I don't do it often, and it isn't such a wonderful sight.
Get the children, and if you tell anyone that I feel this way I'll
murder you."

The children were at some distance lying on the ground. Such
unpromising materials as dust and sage brush had not quenched their
inventive power or hampered their imaginations. They played with as an
absorbed an industry here as in their own garden at home. They had
scraped the earth into mounded shapes marked with the print of baby
fingers and furrowed with paths. One led to a central mound crowned
with a wild sunflower blossom. Up the path to this Bob conducted twigs
of sage, murmuring the adventures that attended their progress. When
they reached the sunflower house he laid them carefully against its
sides, continuing the unseen happenings that befell them on their
entrance. The little girl lay beside him, her cheek resting on an
outflung arm, her eyes fixed wistfully on the personally conducted
party. Her creative genius had not risen to the heights of his, and
her fat little hands were awkward and had pushed the sunflower from its
perch. So she had been excluded from active participation, and now
looked on, acquiescing in her exclusion, a patient and humble spectator.

"Look," Bob cried as he saw Susan approaching. "I've builded a house
and a garden, and these are the people," holding up one of the sage
twigs, "they walk fru the garden an' then go into the house and have
coffee and buf'lo meat."

Susan admired it and then looked at the baby, who was pensively
surveying her brother's creation.

"And did the baby play, too?" she asked.

"Oh, no, she couldn't. She doesn't know nuffing, she's too small,"
with the scorn of one year's superiority.

The baby raised her solemn eyes to the young girl and made no attempt
to vindicate herself. Her expression was that of subdued humility, of
one who admits her short-comings. She rose and thrust a soft hand into
Susan's, and maintained her silence as they walked toward the camp.
The only object that seemed to have power to rouse her from her
dejected reverie were the broken sage stalks in the trail. At each of
these she halted, hanging from Susan's sustaining grasp, and stubbed
her toe accurately and carefully a