, why did you ever turn squaw-man? Why
did you make me a breed?"

"Look here! What ails you?" said the trader.

"What ails me?" she mocked. "Why, I'm neither white nor red; I'm not
even a decent Indian. I'm a--a--" She shuddered. "You made me what I
am. You didn't do me the justice even to marry my mother."

"Somebody's been saying things about you," said Gale, quietly, taking
her by the shoulders. "Who is it? Tell me who it is."

"No, no! It's not that! Nobody has said anything to my face; they're
afraid of you, I suppose, but God knows what they think and say to my
back."

"I'll--" began the trader, but she interrupted him.

"I've just begun to realize what I am. I'm not respectable. I'm not
like other women, and never can be. I'm a squaw--a squaw!"

"You're not!" he cried.

"It's a nice word, isn't it?"

"What's wrong with it?"

"No honest man can marry me. I'm a vagabond! The best I can get is my
bed and board, like my mother."

"By God! Who offered you that?" Gale's face was whiter than hers now,
but she disregarded him and abandoned herself to the tempest of emotion
that swept her along.

"He can play with me, but nothing more, and when he is gone another one
can have me, and then another and another and another--as long as I can
cook and wash and work. In time my man will beat me, just like any
other squaw, I suppose, but I can't marry; I can't be a wife to a
decent man."

She was in the clutch of an hysteria that made her writhe beneath
Gale's hand, choking and sobbing, until he loosed her; then she leaned
exhausted against a post and wiped her eyes, for the tears were coming
now.

"That's all damned rot," he said. "There's fifty good men in this camp
would marry you to-morrow."

"Bah! I mean real men, not miners. I want to be a lady. I don't want to
pull a hand-sled and wear moccasins all my life, and raise children for
men with whiskers. I want to be loved--I want to be loved! I want to
marry a gentleman."

"Burrell!" said Gale.

"No!" she flared up. "Not him nor anybody in particular, but somebody
like him, some man with clean finger-nails."

He found nothing humorous or grotesque in her measure of a gentleman,
for he realized that she was strung to a pitch of unreason and
unnatural excitement, and that she was in terrible earnest.

"Daughter," he said, "I'm mighty sorry this knowledge has come to you,
and I see it's my fault, but things are different now to what they were
when I me