The girl's handsome face flushed; she threw up her hands in an agony of
protest. A dreadful anger was in her panting breast, but she could not
speak. She seemed to choke with excess of feeling. For an instant she
stood still, trembling with agitation, then she sat down suddenly on a
great couch covered with soft deerskins and buffalo robes. There was
deep in her the habit of obedience to this sombre but striking woman.
She had been ruled firmly, almost oppressively, and she had not yet
revolted. Seated on the couch, she gazed out of the window at the flying
snow, her brain too much on fire for thought, passion beating like a
pulse in all her lithe and graceful young body, which had known the
storms of life and time for only twenty years.

The wind shrieked and the snow swept past in clouds of blinding drift,
completely hiding from sight the town below them, whose civilisation had
built itself many habitations and was making roads and streets on the
green-brown plain, where herds of buffalo had stamped and streamed and
thundered not long ago. The town was a mile and a half away, and these
two were alone in a great circle of storm, one of them battling against a
tempest which might yet overtake her, against which she had set her face
ever since she could remember, though it had only come to violence since
her father died two years before--a careless, strong, wilful white man,
who had lived the Indian life for many years, but had been swallowed at
last by the great wave of civilisation streaming westward and northward,
wiping out the game and the Indian, and overwhelming the rough, fighting,
hunting, pioneer life. Joel Renton had made money, by good luck chiefly,
having held land here and there which he had got for nothing, and had
then almost forgotten about it, and, when reminded of it, still held on
to it with that defiant stubbornness which often possesses improvident
and careless natures. He had never had any real business instinct, and
to swagger a little over the land he held and to treat offers of purchase