of fifty went on, seeing nothing but a girl over whom he was
presently going to throw the lasso of his affection and take her home with
him, yielding and glad, a white man and his half-breed girl--but such a
half-breed!

"I seen enough of the way some of them women treated you," he continued,
"and I sez to myself, Her turn next. There's a way out, I sez, and John
Alloway pays his debts. When the anniversary comes round I'll put things
right, I sez to myself. She saved my life, and she shall have the rest of
it, if she'll take it, and will give a receipt in full, and open a new
account in the name of John and Pauline Alloway. Catch it? See--Pauline?"

Slowly she got to her feet. There was a look in her eyes such as had been
in her mother's a little while before, but a hundred times intensified, a
look that belonged to the flood and flow of generations of Indian life,
yet controlled in her by the order and understanding of centuries of white
men's lives, the pervasive, dominating power of race.

For an instant she kept her eyes toward the window. The storm had suddenly
ceased, and a glimmer of sunset light was breaking over the distant wastes
of snow.

"You want to pay a debt you think you owe," she said, in a strange,
lustreless voice, turning to him at last. "Well, you have paid it. You
have given me a book to read which I will keep always. And I give you a
receipt in full for your debt."

"I don't know about any book," he answered, dazedly. "I want to marry you
right away."

"I am sorry, but it is not necessary," she replied, suggestively. Her face
was very pale now.

"But I want to. It ain't a debt. That was only a way of putting it. I want
to make you my wife. I got some position, and I can make the West sit up
and look at you and be glad."

Suddenly her anger flared out, low and vivid and fierce, but her words
were slow and measured. "There is no reason why I should marry you--not
one. You offer me marriage as a prince might give a penny to a beggar. If
my mother were not an Indian woman, you would not have taken it all as a
matter of course. But my father was a white man, and I am a white man's
daughter, and I would rather marry an Indian, who would think me the best
thing there was in the light of the sun, than marry you. Had I been pure
white you would not have been so sure; you would have asked, not offered.
I am not obliged to you. You ought to go to no woman as you came to me.
See, the storm has stopp