home of her own and all the household duties appertaining to it. She was
singing, and a strand of pale-brown hair, crinkly as sea-weed, had blown
across the rose of her cheek, when she felt rather than saw a shadow fall
across her path, and, glancing up, she saw facing her the woman whom she
had supplanted, and the solemn-eyed little girl holding tight to her doll.
Now, neither woman knew a word of the other’s speech, but Sally was
proficient in the language of femininity, and she was not at a loss to
grasp the significance of the purple calico, the beaded buckskin shirt,
and the necklace of elk teeth. The half-breed walked as a chief’s daughter
to the woman at the tub, and Sally grew sick and chill despite her white
skin and the gold ring that made Warren Rodney her man in the face of the
law. The dark woman held Judith proudly by the hand, as a sovereign might
carry a sceptre. Judith was her staff of office, her emblem of authority
in the house of Warren Rodney.

Singing Stream held out her hands to Sally in a gesture of appeal—and
blundered. Of the chief’s daughter, walking proudly, Sally was afraid; but
a supplicating half-breed in strips of purple calico, not even hemmed, was
a matter for merriment. Sally put her hands on her hips, arms akimbo, and
laughed a dry cackle. The light in the brown woman’s eyes, as she looked
at the white, was like prairie-fires rolling forward through darkness.
There was no need of a common speech between them. The whole destiny of
woman was in the laugh and the look that answered it.

And the man they could have murdered for came from the house, an unheroic
figure with suspenders dangling and a corncob pipe in his mouth, sullen,
angry, and withal abjectly frightened, as mere man inevitably is when he
sniffs a woman’s battle in the air. The bride, at sight of her husband,
took to hysterics. She wept, she laughed, and down tumbled her hair. She
felt the situation demanded a scene. Rodney, with a marital brevity hardly