began to break, after the manner of the women of her father’s people. She
had begun her race with time a decade after Warren Rodney, and she had
outdistanced him by a decade.

And then the Tumlins came from Tennessee to the Black Hills. They came in
an ox-cart, and the days of their journey were more than two years. They
had stopped in Ohio, and again in Illinois; and, behold! neither was the
promised land, the land that their excited imaginations had painted from
the large talk of returning travellers, and that was further glorified
through their own thriftless discontent with conditions at home. They had
travelled on and on across half a continent in the wake of a vanishing
sky-line. The vague westward impulse was luring them to California, but
they waited in Dakota that their starved stock might fatten, and while
they rested themselves from the long journey, Warren Rodney made the
acquaintance of Sally Tumlin, who rallied him on being a "squaw man."

Warren Rodney had almost forgotten the sorceries of the women of his
people; he had lived so long with a brown woman, who spread no silken
snares. Sally’s blushes stirred a multitude of dead things—the wiles of
pale women, all strength in weakness, fragile flowers for tender
handling—the squaw had grown as withered as a raisin.

Now, Sally Tumlin had no convictions about life but that the world owed
her "a home of her own." Her mother had forged the bolt of this particular
maxim at an early date. And Sally saw from precocious observation that the
business of women was home-getting, to which end they must be neat and
sweet and sparing of speech. After the home was forthcoming, then, indeed,
might a woman take ease in slippers and wrapper, and it is surely a wife’s
privilege to speak her mind. Sally knew that she hated travelling westward
after the crawling oxen; each day the sun pursued them, caught up with