."

"Good enough! I'll have some races for my own edification and comfort,"
and he drew out some coins. "Will you run for this--run far over there?"

The children looked at the girl. She nodded her head, said a word or two
unintelligible to him, but perfectly clear to them; for, with sharp looks
at the coins and pleased yells, they leaped away to their racing.

"Now, this is more comfortable," he said. "May I sit down here? Thanks!
Now would you mind telling me whose likeness it is you are making in the
clay?"

"I guess you know it's nobody's likeness," she answered, and again thrust
it back out of sight, her face flushing that he should thus make a jest of
her poor efforts. "You've seen real statues, I suppose, and know how they
ought to be, but you don't need to look for them in the Purcell Range."

"But, indeed, I am in earnest about your modeling. Won't you believe me?"
and the blue eyes looking into her own were so appealing, that she turned
away her head half shyly, and a pink flush crept up from her throat. Miss
Rivers was evidently not used to eyes with caressive tendencies and they
disturbed her, for all her strangely unchildlike character.

"Of course, your work is only in the rough," he continued; "but it is not
at all bad, and has real Indian features. And if you have had no
teaching--"

"Huh!" and she looked at him with a mirthless smile. "Where'd any one get
teaching of that sort along the Columbia River? Of course, there are some
gentlemen--officers and such--about the reservations, but not one but
would only laugh at such a big girl making doll babies out of mud. No, I
had no teaching to do anything but read, and I did read some in a book
about a sculptor, and how he made animals and people's faces out of clay.
Then I tried."

As she grew communicative, she seemed so much more what she really was in
years--a child; and he noticed, with satisfaction, that she looked at him
more frankly, while the suspicion faded almost entirely from her face.

"And are you going to develop into a sculptor under Overton's
guardianship?" he asked. "You see, he has told me of his good luck."

She made a queer little sound between a laugh and a grunt.

"I'll bet the rest of the blue beads he didn't call it good luck," she
returned, looking at him keenly. "Now, honest Injun--did he?"

"Honest Injun! he didn't speak of it as either good or bad luck; simply as
a matter of course, that at your father's death you shoul