issy rated had not the smallest
place in her enemy's thoughts. A poet's words had lifted Irene in an
instant from child hell to heaven, had fired her imagination, had
rekindled her pride, had given back her dreams.

Reality was not altogether so pleasant, she found, when she went into
the kitchen, skirmished with the Chinese cook for Jim's dinner, and
went out to the woodpile to give it to him herself.

She did not wait to see him eat it--she was not poet enough for that;
and, that impersonal, composite father, her tribe, was calling her.

Pulling on her hood and jacket, with her mittens dangling from a red
tape on each side, she flew out and down the long, rickety stairs which
a former senator from Nevada had built up the mountain's side, when he
planned for his home a magnificent view of the mountains and desert off
toward the east.

Split did not look at either, though they shone, the one like a billowy
moonlit sea, the other like a lake of silver, because of the snow that
covered them. She half ran, half slid down the hilly street till she
came to a box-like miner's cabin, where Jane Cody, the washerwoman,
lived with her son. In front of it she halted and called imperiously:

"Jack!"

For this same Jack was her own, her discovery, her possession, who
acknowledged her thrall and was proud of it.

But the green shutters over the one window remained fast, and the door
tight closed.

"Jack?" There was a suggestion of incredulity in Split's voice.

[Illustration:
"'I want you--come!' the Indian princess announced"]

The whistles burst forth in a medley of throaty roars (it was
five-o'clock "mining-time"), but the bird-like whistle of Jack was
missing.

"Jack Cody!" Split stamped her high arctics in the snow.

The door was opened a little, and a round black head was cautiously
thrust forth.

"I want you--come!" the Indian princess announced. "And get your sled."

"I can't," replied the head.

"But I want you."

The head wagged dolefully.

"Why not?"

The head hung down.

"Tell me."

The head's negative was sorrowful but determined.

"If you don't tell me I'll--never speak to you again 's long as I live,
Jack Cody!"

The head stretched out its long neck and sent an agonized glance toward
her.

"Tell me--right now!" she commanded.

"Well--she's took my clothes with her," wailed the head, and jerked
itself within, while the door was slammed behind it.

Split walked up the stoop.