Her mind was too busy with the story White Mink had told her that
morning.

After the men had started off on a buffalo hunt Swift Fawn had left the
other children to their games in the village and stolen away to the
favorite bathing place of the women-folk.

"No one will disturb me there," she had said to herself, "and I want to
be all by myself to think it over."

After she had been there for sometime. Swift Fawn drew out from the
folds of her deerskin jacket a baby's sock, and turned it over and over
in her hands curiously. Never had she seen the like of it before. How
pretty it was! Who could have had the skill to weave the threads of
scarlet silk in and out of the soft wool in such a dainty pattern? Was
it--the child whispered the word--could it have been her mother?

White Mink had always been so good to her, Surely no real mother could
have been more loving than the Indian woman who had watched over her
and tended her, and taught her from the time when Three Bears had
brought her, a year-old baby, to his wife. Where he found the little
one, he had never told.

And so she was a white child. How strange it was! Yet she had grown
up into a big girl, loving the ways of the red people more and more
deeply for eight happy years.

"Surely," thought the child, "I could not have loved my own parents
more than I do White Mink and Three Bears."