Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney looked upon the disappearance of the squaw
in the light of a providential solution of the difficulties attending
their romance. They admitted it was square of her to "hit the trail," and
they decided to lose no time in going to the army post, where a chaplain,
an Indian missionary, happened to be staying at the time, and have a real
wedding, with a ring and a fee to the parson. The wedding party started
for the post, old mother Tumlin fluttering about the bride as complacently
as if the ceremony had been the culmination of the most decorous
courtship. The oafish brother drove the bridal party, making crude jests
by-the-way, to the frank delight of the prospective groom and the giggling
protestations of the bride. The chaplain at the post was disposed to ask
few questions. Parsons made queer marriages in those tumultuous days, and
it was regarded as a patent of worthy motives that the pair should call in
the man of the gospel at all. To the question whether or not he had been
married before, Rodney answered:

"Well, parson, this is the first time I have ever stood up for a life
sentence." And the ceremony proceeded.

Some of the ladies at the post, hearing that there was to be a wedding,
dropped in and added their smiles and flutterings to the rather grim
party; among them, Mrs. Atkins, who had just come to the post as a bride.
They even added a trifle or two from their own store of pretty things, as
presents to Sally. And Miss Tumlin left the post Mrs. Warren Rodney, with
"a home of her own" to go to.

Singing Stream did not hasten in her quest for bright fabrics with which
to stay the hand of fate. To the half-breed woman the journey to town was
not without a certain revivifying pleasure. The Indian in her stirred to
the call of the open country. The tight roof to the cabin on Elder Creek
had not the attractions for her that it had for Sally Tumlin. She had
chafed sometimes at a house with four walls. But now the dead and gone
braves rose in her as she followed the old trail where they had so often
crept to battle against their old enemies, the Crows, before the white
man's army had scattered them. And as she drove through the foot-hill
country, she told the solemn-eyed little Judith the story of the Sioux,
and what a great fighting people they had been before Rodney's people
drove them from their land. Judith was holding a doll dressed exactly like
herself, in soft buckskin shirt, lit