e, of which she had
little, and which was hard for her to attain.

Jim grinned.

"She no got little gal like you teach her Inglis," he said, gently
apologetic.

"Not she, Jim; _he_. How old is your little girl?" Split remembered that
a genteel interest in the lower classes is becoming to the well-born.

"He just big like you," Jim responded mournfully, drawing the back of
his brown hand across his nose. "But he all gone."

"Dead?" Split crossed her legs uneasily as she squatted, and lowered her
voice reverently.

"He no dead," Jim said, lifting the sawbuck and easing it on his
shoulder. "One Washoe squaw steal him--little papoose, nice little
papoose. Much white--like you, missy. So white, squaw say no sure
Injun."

"Jim!"

"Take him down Tluckee valley. Take him 'way. Jim see squaw one day long
time 'go--Washoe Lake--shoot ducks. Heap shoot squaw. He die, but he say
white Faginia man got papoose."

"Jim!" It was the faintest echo of the first terrified exclamation.

"Come Faginia, look papoose. No find. Chop wood long time. Heap
hogady--not much dinner. Nice papoose--white, like you."

Jim paused. He expected sympathy, but he hoped for dinner. When he saw
he was to get neither, he hunched his lame hip; scratched his head,
balanced the sawbuck, and shuffled away.

Too overcome to move, Split sat looking after him. Her father! This,
then, was her father! She was dazed, helpless, too overwhelmed even to
be unhappy yet.

There came a shrill call for her from Kate, and Split, with unaccustomed
meekness, staggered obediently to her feet. What was left for her but to
be a slave, she said stonily to herself. She was an Indian like--like
her father! And Sissy had noticed the resemblance that very afternoon!

"It's the bell, Split," explained Kate, who was reading "The Spanish
Gypsy" in the low, hall-like library.

She had begun to read the book for the reason that no one in her class
at school had read it--usually a compelling reason for the eldest of the
Madigans; but the poetic beauty, the extravagance of the romance, had
whirled the girl away from her pretentious pose, and she was finishing
it now because she could not help it; chained to it, it seemed to her,
till she should know the end.

"Shall I go?" asked Split, humbly, looking up at her sister.

Kate looked up, too surprised by her sister's docility to do anything
but nod. She had anticipated a battle, a ring at the door-bell being the
signal for