never
will--be. Occasional friendships bridge the feud between our alien
races, but the feud remains. It is eternal. Endless as the years which
will witness the gradual extinction of the weaker, because smaller,
race. Let us dream no more. Has Wahneenah, my sister, observed how the
store she left in the old cave has grown? How the few sealed jars have
become many, and how there are heaps of the good gifts which the Great
Father sent to his white children at the Fort for the red children's
use?"

"Yes. I thought it was the miser, Shut-Hand, who had placed them here
in our cave."

"It was I, the Black Partridge."

"For what purpose, my brother?"

"Against the needs of the time I have foretold. It is a sanctuary.
Here may Wahneenah, and the young son and daughter which have been
given her, find shelter and sustenance."

Something of her old tribal exultation seized the woman, who was a
great chief's daughter. Rising to her fullest height, her fine head
thrown slightly back, she demanded, indignantly:

"Is the heart of my brother become like that of the papoose upon its
mother's shoulders? Was it not to the red men that the victory came,
but so brief time past? What were all the pale-faces, in their gaudy
costumes, with their music and their guns and their childish way of
battle? The arrows of our people mowed them like the grass upon the
prairie when a herd of wild horses feeds upon it. But yesterday they
marched in pride and insolence, scorning us. To-day, they are carrion
for the crows overhead, or they flee for safety like the cowards they
were born. The Black Partridge has tarried too long among such as
these. He has become their blood brother."

The taunt was the fiercest she could give, and she gave it from a full
heart. In ordinary so gentle and peace-loving she had been roused, for
a moment, to a pitch of emotion which astonished even herself. Yet
when, as if she had been a fractious child, the chief motioned her to
again become seated, she obeyed him at once. She had set her thoughts
free, indeed; but she would never presume to fight against the
conditions which surrounded her; and obedience to tribal authority was
inborn.

"The Snake-Who-Leaps will be at the tepee of my sister each day when
the sun climbs to the point overhead. The three horses will be always
ready. The children who do not know, and Wahneenah who has, maybe,
forgotten how to ride, will practise as he instructs, until there will
be no