since dinner. I am dead sober. I am solemn. I sit here now side
by side with my sacred youth. It is not I--'old'
Trefethan--that talks; it is my youth, and it is my youth that
says those were the most wonderful eyes I have ever seen--so
very calm, so very restless; so very wise, so very curious; so
very old, so very young; so satisfied and yet yearning so
wistfully. Boys, I can't describe them. When I have told you
about her, you may know better for yourselves."

"She did not stand up. But she put out her hand."

"'Stranger,' she said, 'I'm real glad to see you.'

"I leave it to you--that sharp, frontier, Western tang of
speech. Picture my sensations. It was a woman, a white woman,
but that tang! It was amazing that it should be a white woman,
here, beyond the last boundary of the world--but the tang. I
tell you, it hurt. It was like the stab of a flatted note. And
yet, let me tell you, that woman was a poet. You shall see."

"She dismissed the Indians. And, by Jove, they went. They took
her orders and followed her blind. She was hi-yu skookam chief.
She told the bucks to make a camp for me and to take care of my
dogs. And they did, too. And they knew enough not to get away
with as much as a moccasin-lace of my outfit. She was a regular
She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and I want to tell you it chilled me to
the marrow, sent those little thrills Marathoning up and down
my spinal column, meeting a white woman out there at the head
of a tribe of savages a thousand miles the other side of No
Man's Land.