the course of time, gave evidence that she, also, possessed an ultra-
feminine, almost heroic capacity for attending strictly to her own
business and permitting others to attend to theirs.

Early in her occupation of the adobe ranch house Mrs. Corblay had
inaugurated the hat industry, with fresh vegetables as a side line. The
garden was presided over by a dolorous squaw who responded to the
rather fanciful appellation of Soft Wind. Sam Singer, her buck, was a
stolid, stodgy savage, with eyes like the slits in a blackberry pie.
Originally the San Pasqualians had christened him "Psalm Singer,"
because of the fact that once, during a revival held by an itinerant
evangelist in a tent next door to the Silver Dollar saloon, the buck
had attended regularly, attracted by the melody of a little portable
organ, the plaintive strains of which appeared to charm his heathen
soul. An unorthodox citizen, in the sheer riot of his imagination, had
saddled the buck with his new name. It had stuck to him, and since in
the vernacular psalm singer was pronounced "sam singer," the Indian
came in time to be known by that name and would answer to none other.

Donna grew up slightly different from the other little girls in San
Pasqual. For instance: she was never allowed to play in the dirt of the
main street with other children; she wore white dresses that were
always clean, new ribbons in her hair; she always carried a
handkerchief; she attended the little public school with the belfry but
no bell, and her mother trained her in domestic science and the
precepts of religion, which, lacking definite direction perhaps by
reason of the fact that there was no church in San Pasqual, served,
nevertheless, as a bulwark against the assaults of vice and vulgarity
which, in a frontier town, are very thinly veiled. As a child she was
neither precocious nor shy. From a rather homely, long-legged gangling