desert, turned from him to the problems that beset her, and from them back
to him again, in dull, subconscious yearning. She could no longer project
an anguished consciousness to those scenes wherein he walked and talked
with Kitty. Her Indian fatalism had intervened. "Life was life," to be
lived or left. And yet she felt herself a poor creature, one who had lived
long on illusion, who had bent her neck to the yoke of arid unrealities.
The pale-haired woman who kept him with her miserliness of self, who
intruded no sombre tragedy of loving, was well worth a trip across the
foot-hills to see. And yet, Judith reflected, it was the portion of her
mother's daughter to make of loving the whole business of life, even if
she rebelled and fought against it as an accursed destiny. It was in her
inheritance to know and live for the wild thrill of ecstasy in her pulses,
to feel trembling joy and despair and frantic hope, that exacted its
tribute hardly less poignant; as it was, also, to feel a shivering
sensitiveness in regard to the loneliness and bitterness of her life, to
have the same measureless capacity for sorrow that she had for loving, to
have a soul attuned to the tragedy of things, to love the mighty forces
about her, to feel the reflection of all their moods in her heart, and,
lastly, it was her destiny to be the daughter of a half-Sioux and a border
adventurer, and to feel the counter influences of the two races make
forever of her heart a battleground.

Her light feet scarcely touched the ground as she sped swiftly through all
the network of the hills; and more than once her woman's heart asked the
question, "And, prithee, Judith, if from henceforth you are only to hold
fellowship with the stars and have no part in the ways of men, why do you
walk a day's journey to catch a glimpse of a pale-haired woman?"

She knew the probable course of the wolf-hunt. She had been on scores of
them, galloped with Peter after the fleeing gray thing that swept along
the ground like the nucleus of a whirling dust-devil. At least she was
sure of the place of their nooning--a limpid stream that ran close to many
young pine-trees. Here was a pause in the rugged ascent, a level space of
open green, thick with buffalo grass. Many times had she been here with
Peter, sometimes with many other people on the chase--sometimes, and these
occasions were enshrined in her memory, each with its own particular halo,
with Peter alone; and they had fis