found the white baby sleeping by her dead mother after the massacre of an
emigrant train. They took her with them and she grew up, in the Black Hill
country, a white-skinned Sioux, marrying a chief of the people that had
slain her people. She accepted her squaw’s portion uncomplainingly; slaved
cheerfully at squaw’s work while her brave made war on the whites, hunted,
and smoked. She reared her half-breed children in the legends of their
father’s people, and died, a withered crone, cursing the pale-faces who
had robbed the Sioux of the buffalo and their hunting-ground.

Her daughter, Singing Stream, who knew no word of English, but who could
do better bead-work than any squaw in the tribe, went to live with Warren
Rodney when he finished his cabin on Elder Creek. That was before the gold
fever reached the Black Hills, and Rodney built the cabin that he might
fish and hunt and forget the East and why he left it. There were reasons
why he wanted to forget his identity as a white man in his play at being
an Indian. In the first flare of youth and the joy of having come into her
woman’s kingdom, the half-breed squaw was pretty; she was proud, too, of
her white man, the house he had built her, and the girl pappoose with blue
eyes. Furthermore, she had been taught to serve man meekly, for he was the
lord of creation.

Rodney talked Sioux to her. He had all but forgotten he was a white man.
The girl pappoose ran about the cabin, brown and bare, but for the bead
jacket Singing Stream had made for her in the pride of her maternity.
Rodney called the little girl "Judith." Her Indian mother never guessed
the significance of the strange name that she could not say, but made at
least ten soft singing syllables of, in the Indian way. The little Judith
greeted her father in strange lispings; Warren Rodney was far from unhappy
in playing at primitive man. This recessional into conditions primeval
endured for "seven snows," as the Indian tongue hath it. Then the squaw