to act quickly. He snatched Judith from her mother and took her into
the house, and he returned with his Winchester, which was not loaded, to
Singing Stream.

"You got to go," he said, and levelling the Winchester, he repeated the
command. Singing Stream looked at him with the dumb wonder of a forest
thing. "I was a good squaw to you," she said; and did not even curse him.
And turning, she ran towards the foot-hills, with all the length of purple
calico trailing.

Now Mrs. Rodney, _nee_ Tumlin, was but human, and her cup of happiness as
the wife of a "squaw man" was not the brimming beaker she had anticipated.
The expulsion of her predecessor, at such a time, to make room for her own
home-coming, was, it seemed, open to criticism. "The neighborhood"--it
included perhaps five families living in a radius of as many hundred
miles--felt that the Tumlins had established a bad precedent. A "squaw man"
driving out a brown wife to make room for a white is not a heroic figure.
It had been done before, but it would not hand down well in the traditions
of the settling of this great country. Trespass of law and order, with
their swift, red-handed reckoning, were but moves of the great game of
colonization. But to shove out a brown woman for a white was a mean move.
Few stopped at the Rodneys' ranch, though it marked the first break in the
journey from town to the gold-mining country. Rodney had fallen from his
estate as a pioneer; his political opinions were unsought in the conclaves
that sat and spat at the stove, when business brought them to the joint
saloon and post-office. The women dealt with the question more openly,
scorning feminine subtlety at this pass as inadequate ammunition. When
they met Mrs. Rodney they pulled aside their skirts and glared. This
outrage against woman it was woman's work to settle.

Mrs. Rodney, who had no more moral sense than a rabbit, felt that she was
the victim of persecution. She knew she was a good woman. Hadn't she a
husband? Had there ever been a word against her character? What was the
use of making all that fuss over a squaw? It was not as if she was a white
woman. The injustice of it preyed on the former Miss Tumlin. She took to
the consolations of snuff-dipping and fell from her pink-and-white estate.

The Tumlin family did not remain long enough in the Black Hill country to
witness Sally's failure as the wife of a pioneer. The restlessness of the
"settler," if the paradox be permissi