her forehead--yes, she thought she'd read something in school.
Shelley?--"The Ode to the West Wind?" No, she'd never read that. What
was an ode anyway? Once he recited the "Lines to an Indian Air," his
voice trembling a little, for the words were almost sacred.

She pondered for a space and then said:

"What are champak odors?"

David didn't know. He had never thought of inquiring.

"Isn't that odd," she murmured. "That would have been the first thing
I would have wanted to know. Champak? I suppose it's some kind of a
flower--something like a magnolia. It has a sound like a magnolia."

A lively imagination was evidently not one of Miss Gillespie's
possessions.

Late one afternoon, riding some distance in front of the train, she and
David had seen an Indian loping by on his pony. It was not an unusual
sight. Many Indians had visited their camp and at the crossing of the
Kaw they had come upon an entire village in transit to the summer
hunting grounds. But there was something in this lone figure, moving
solitary through the evening glow, that put him in accord with the
landscape's solemn beauty, retouched him with his lost magnificence.
In buckskins black with filth, his blanket a tattered rag, an ancient
rifle across his saddle, the undying picturesqueness of the red man was
his.

"Look," said David, his imagination fired. "Look at that Indian."

The savage saw them and turned a face of melancholy dignity upon them,
giving forth a deep "How, How."

"He's a very dirty Indian," said Susan, sweeping him with a glance of
disfavor.

David did not hear her. He looked back to watch the lonely figure as
it rode away over the swells. It seemed to him to be riding into the
past, the lordly past, when the red man owned the land and the fruits
thereof.

"Look at him as he rides away," he said. "Can't you seem to see him
coming home from a battle with his face streaked with vermilion and his
war bonnet on? He'd be solemn and grand with the wet scalps dripping
at his belt. When they saw him coming his squaws would come out in
front of the lodges and begin to sing the war chant."

"Squaws!" in a tone of disgust. "That's as bad as the Mormons."

The muse had possession of David and a regard for monogamy was not
sufficient to stay his noble rage.

"And think how he felt! All this was his, the pale face hadn't come.
He'd fought his enemies for it and driven them back. In the cool of
the evening when h