hem stranded in the
wilderness, and rose again and mocked them on the morrow. Her father and
oafish brother loved the makeshifts of the wagon life, with its chance
shots at fleeing antelope, scurrying sage-hens, and bounding cotton-tails;
a chance parley with a stray Indian but added zest to the game of chance.
But Sally hated it all. The cabin on Elder Creek had a tight roof; Warren
Rodney had money in the bank. He had had uncommon luck at trapping. His
talk to Sally was largely of his prospects.

Sally knew that the world owed her "a home of her own"; and why should she
let a squaw keep her from it? Sally's mother giggled when consulted. She
plainly regarded the squaw as a rival of her daughter. The ethics of the
case, as far as Mrs. Tumlin was concerned, was merely a question of white
skin against brown, and which should carry the day. Singing Stream knew
not one word of the talk, much of which occurred in her very presence,
that threatened to pull her home about her ears, but she knew that Sally
was taking her man from her. The white-skinned woman wore white ruffles
about her neck and calico dresses that were the color of the wild roses
that grew among the willows at the creek. Sally Tumlin's pink calico gowns
sowed a crop of nettles in the mind of the squaw. It was the rainbow
things, she felt, that were robbing her of her man. All her barbaric
craving for glowing colors asserted itself as a means towards the one
great end of keeping him. Singing Stream began to scheme schemes. One day
Rodney was splitting wood at the Tumlin camp--though why he should split
wood where there were two women puzzled the squaw. But the ways of the
pale-faces were beyond her ken. She only knew that she must make herself
beautiful in the eyes of Warren Rodney, like this devil woman, and then
perhaps the pappoose that she expected with the first snowfall would be a
man-child; and she hoped great things of this happening.

With such primitive reasoning did Singing Stream put the horses to the
light wagon, and, taking the little Judith with her, drove to Deadwood, a
matter of two hundred miles, to buy the bright calicoes that were to make
her like a white woman. It never occurred to the half-breed woman to make
known her plans to Warren Rodney. In circumventing Sally Tumlin the man
became the spoils of war, and it is not the Indian way to tell plans on
the war-trail. So the squaw left her kingdom in the hands of the enemy,
without a word.