with contempt was the loud assertion of a capacity he did not possess.
So it was that stubborn vanity, beneath which was his angry protest
against the prejudice felt by the new people of the West for the white
pioneer who married an Indian, and lived the Indian life,--so it was that
this gave him competence and a comfortable home after the old trader had
been driven out by the railway and the shopkeeper. With the first land
he sold he sent his daughter away to school in a town farther east and
south, where she had been brought in touch with a life that at once
cramped and attracted her; where, too, she had felt the first chill
of racial ostracism, and had proudly fought it to the end, her weapons
being talent, industry, and a hot, defiant ambition.

There had been three years of bitter, almost half-sullen, struggle,
lightened by one sweet friendship with a girl whose face she had since
drawn in a hundred different poses on stray pieces of paper, on the walls
of the big, well-lighted attic to which she retreated for hours every
day, when she was not abroad on the prairies, riding the Indian pony that
her uncle the Piegan Chief, Ice Breaker, had given her years before.
Three years of struggle, and then her father had died, and the refuge for
her vexed, defiant heart was gone. While he lived she could affirm the
rights of a white man's daughter, the rights of the daughter of a pioneer
who had helped to make the West; and her pride in him had given a glow to
her cheek and a spring to her step which drew every eye. In the chief
street of Portage la Drome men would stop their trafficking and women
nudge each other when she passed, and wherever she went she stirred
interest, excited admiration, or aroused prejudice--but the prejudice did
not matter so long as her father, Joel Renton, lived. Whatever his
faults, and they were many--sometimes he drank too much, and swore a
great deal, and bullied and stormed--she blinked at them all, for he was
of the conquering race, a white man who had slept in white sheets and