d look him up,
and let him know you were alone. Oh, he is a good fellow, Dan is, and
glad, I am sure, to be of use to you."

Her lips opened in a little sigh of content, and a swift, radiant smile
was given him.

"I'm right glad you say that about him," she answered, "and I guess you
know him well, too. Akkomi likes him, and Akkomi's sharp."

The winner of the race here trotted back for the coin, and Lyster showed
another one, as an incentive for all to scatter along the beach again. It
looked as though the two white people must pay for the grant of privacy on
the river-bank.

Having grown more at ease with him, 'Tana resumed again the patting and
pressing of the clay, using only a little pointed stick, while Lyster
watched, with curiosity, the ingenious way in which she seemed to feel her
way to form.

"Have you ever tried to draw?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"Only to copy pictures, like I've seen in some papers, but they never
looked right. But I want to do everything like that--to make pictures, and
statues, and music, and--oh, all the lovely things there are somewhere,
that I've never seen--never will see them, I suppose. Sometimes, when I
get to thinking that I never will see them, I just get as ugly as a
drunken man, and I don't care if I never do see anything but Indians
again. I get so awful reckless. Say!" she said, again with that hard,
short laugh, "girls back your way don't get wild like that, do they? They
don't talk my way either, I guess."

"Maybe not, and few of them would be able, either, to do what we saw you
do in this river yesterday," he said kindly. "Dan is a judge of such
things, you know, and he thought you very nervy."

"Nervy? Oh, yes; I guess he'd be nervy himself if he was needed. Say! can
you tell me about the camp, or settlement, at this Sinna Ferry? I never
was there. He says white women are there. Do you know them?"

Lyster explained his own ignorance of the place, knowing it as he did only
through Dan's descriptions.

Then she, from her bit of Indian knowledge, told him Sinna was the old
north Indian name for Beaver. Then he got her to tell him other things of
the Indian country, things of ghost-haunted places and strange witcheries,
with which they confused the game and the fish. He fell to wondering what
manner of man Rivers, the partner of Dan, had been, that his daughter had
gained such strange knowledge of the wild things. But any attempt to learn
or question her