eaten off white tablecloths, and used a knife and fork, since he was
born; and the women of his people had had soft petticoats and fine
stockings, and silk gowns for festal days, and feathered hats of velvet,
and shoes of polished leather, always and always, back through many
generations. She had held her head high, for she was of his women, of
the women of his people, with all their rights and all their claims. She
had held it high till that stormy day--just such a day as this, with the
surf of snow breaking against the house--when they carried him in out of
the wild turmoil and snow, laying him on the couch where she now sat, and
her head fell on his lifeless breast, and she cried out to him in vain to
come back to her.

Before the world her head was still held high, but in the attic-room,
and out on the prairies far away, where only the coyote or the prairie-
hen saw, her head drooped, and her eyes grew heavy with pain and sombre
protest. Once in an agony of loneliness, and cruelly hurt by a
conspicuous slight put upon her at the Portage by the wife of the Reeve
of the town, who had daughters twain of pure white blood got from behind
the bar of a saloon in Winnipeg, she had thrown open her window at night
with the frost below zero, and stood in her thin nightdress, craving the
death which she hoped the cold would give her soon. It had not availed,
however, and once again she had ridden out in a blizzard to die, but had
come upon a man lost in the snow, and her own misery had passed from her,
and her heart, full of the blood of plainsmen, had done for another what
it would not do for itself. The Indian in her had, with strange, sure
instinct, found its way to Portage la Drome, the man with both hands and
one foot frozen, on her pony, she walking at his side, only conscious
that she had saved one, not two, lives that day.

Here was another such day, here again was the storm in her heart which