ere the big Colt's revolver lay beneath a pillow.

"Greeting, O Woman of the Wondrous Hair," said Li Wan.

But she said it in her own tongue, the tongue spoken in but a little
corner of the earth, and the women did not understand.

"Shall I go for help?" Miss Giddings quavered.

"The poor creature is harmless, I think," Mrs. Van Wyck replied. "And
just look at her skin-clothes, ragged and trail-worn and all that.
They are certainly unique. I shall buy them for my collection. Get my
sack, Myrtle, please, and set up the scales."

Li Wan followed the shaping of the lips, but the words were
unintelligible, and then, and for the first time, she realized, in
a moment of suspense and indecision, that there was no medium of
communication between them.

And at the passion of her dumbness she cried out, with arms stretched
wide apart, "O Woman, thou art sister of mine!"

The tears coursed down her cheeks as she yearned toward them, and the
break in her voice carried the sorrow she could not utter. But Miss
Giddings was trembling, and even Mrs. Van Wyck was disturbed.

"I would live as you live. Thy ways are my ways, and our ways be one.
My husband is Canim, the Canoe, and he is big and strange, and I am
afraid. His trail is all the world and never ends, and I am weary. My
mother was like you, and her hair was as thine, and her eyes. And life
was soft to me then, and the sun warm."

She knelt humbly, and bent her head at Mrs. Van Wyck's feet. But Mrs.
Van Wyck drew away, frightened at her vehemence.

Li Wan stood up, panting for speech. Her dumb lips could not
articulate her overmastering consciousness of kind.

"Trade? you trade?" Mrs. Van Wyck questioned, slipping, after the
fashion of the superior peoples, into pigeon tongue.

She touched Li Wan's ragged skins to indicate her choice, and poured
several hundreds of gold into the blower. She stirred the dust about
and trickled its yellow lustre temptingly through her fingers. But Li
Wan saw only the fingers, milk-white and shapely, tapering daintily
to the rosy, jewel-like nails. She placed her own hand alongside, all
work-worn and calloused, and wept.

Mrs. Van Wyck misunderstood. "Gold," she encouraged. "Good gold! You
trade? You changee for changee?" And she laid her hand again on Li
Wan's skin garments.

"How much? You sell? How much?" she persisted, running her hand
against the way of the hair so that she might make sure of the
sinew-thread seam.

But Li W