. Joel Renton had made money, by good luck chiefly,
having held land here and there which he had got for nothing, and had then
almost forgotten about it, and, when reminded of it, still held on to it
with that defiant stubbornness which often possesses improvident and
careless natures. He had never had any real business instinct, and to
swagger a little over the land he held and to treat offers of purchase
with contempt was the loud assertion of a capacity he did not possess. So
it was that stubborn vanity, beneath which was his angry protest against
the prejudice felt by the new people of the West for the white pioneer who
married an Indian and lived the Indian life--so it was that this gave him
competence and a comfortable home after the old trader had been driven out
by the railway and the shopkeeper. With the first land he sold he sent his
daughter away to school in a town farther east and south, where she had
been brought in touch with a life that at once cramped and attracted her;
where, too, she had felt the first chill of racial ostracism, and had
proudly fought it to the end, her weapons being talent, industry, and a
hot, defiant ambition.

There had been three years of bitter, almost half-sullen, struggle,
lightened by one sweet friendship with a girl whose face she had since
drawn in a hundred different poses on stray pieces of paper, on the walls
of the big, well-lighted attic to which she retreated for hours every day,
when she was not abroad on the prairies, riding the Indian pony that her
uncle the Piegan Chief, Ice Breaker, had given her years before. Three
years of struggle, and then her father had died, and the refuge for her
vexed, defiant heart was gone. While he lived she could affirm the rights
of a white man's daughter, the rights of the daughter of a pioneer who had
helped to make the West; and her pride in him had given a glow to her
cheek and a spring to her step which drew every eye. In the chief street
of Portage la Drome men would stop their trafficking and women nudge one
another when she passed, and wherever she went she stirred interest,
excited admiration, or aroused prejudice--but the prejudice did not matter
so long as her father, Joel Renton, lived. Whatever his faults, and they
were many--sometimes he drank too much, and swore a great deal, and
bullied and stormed--she blinked at them all, for he was of the conquering
race, a white man who had slept in white sheets and eaten off white