each possessed with the laudable ambition of dancing his
or her partner down. As may readily be imagined, it is
a dance necessitating considerable powers of endurance.
When one of the dancers sinks exhausted and vanquished,
another steps into the breach. When Dorothy had made her
appearance, a slim and by no means bad-looking half-breed
girl had been unwillingly obliged to drop out of the
dance. The bright eyes of the new arrival had caught
Pierre La Chene's fancy, and, after the manner of his
kind, he had made haste to secure her as a partner. Pierre
was a philanderer and an inconstant swain. The dark eyes
of Katie the Belle flushed with anger as she saw this
strange girl take her place. She noticed with jealous
eyes the elegant fur coat which the other wore, the dainty
silk-sewn moccasins, the natty beaver cap, and felt that
she, herself a leader of fashion among her people, had
yet much to learn.

Dorothy stood stock still for a moment while her partner
and the spectators shouted to her to begin. A wrinkled
old dame remarked, in the flowery language of her people,
that, as the figure of the girl was slender as the willow,
and her feet small and light as those of the wood spirits
that return to the land in the spring, surely she could
out-dance Pierre La Chene, who had already out-worn the
light-footed Jeanette and the beautiful Katie. Pierre
shouted to his partner to make a start. Surely now she
must be discovered and undone!

Then something that, when one comes to think of it, was