Rock, with another laugh, slipped away swiftly toward the river.

"That is good," he muttered. "She will kill him perhaps, when she goes
to him. She will go, but he will not stay. I have heard."

As he disappeared among the trees Mitiahwe disengaged herself from her
mother's arms, went slowly back into the lodge, and sat down on the great
couch where, for so many moons, she had lain with her man beside her.

Her mother watched her closely, though she moved about doing little
things. She was trying to think what she would have done if such a thing
had happened to her, if her man had been going to leave her. She assumed
that Dingan would leave Mitiahwe, for he would hear the voices of his
people calling far away, even as the red man who went East into the great
cities heard the prairies and the mountains and the rivers and his own
people calling, and came back, and put off the clothes of civilisation,
and donned his buckskins again, and sat in the Medicine Man's tent, and
heard the spirits speak to him through the mist and smoke of the sacred
fire. When Swift Wing first gave her daughter to the white man she
foresaw the danger now at hand, but this was the tribute of the lower
race to the higher, and--who could tell! White men had left their Indian
wives, but had come back again, and for ever renounced the life of their
own nations, and become great chiefs, teaching useful things to their
adopted people, bringing up their children as tribesmen--bringing up
their children! There it was, the thing which called them back, the
bright-eyed children with the colour of the brown prairie in their faces,
and their brains so sharp and strong. But here was no child to call
Dingan back, only the eloquent, brave, sweet face of Mitiahwe. . . .
If he went! Would he go? Was he going? And now that Mitiahwe had been
told that he would go, what would she do? In her belt was--but, no, that