up and down the tepee walls, and the more he watched
Oachi the stronger there grew within him something that seemed to gnaw and
gripe with a dull sort of pain. Oachi was beautiful. He had never seen hair
like her hair. He had never before seen eyes more beautiful. He had never
heard a voice so low and sweet and filled with bird-like ripples of music.
She was beautiful, and yet with her beauty there was a primitiveness, a
gentle savagery, and an age-old story written in the fine lines of her face
which made him uneasy with the thought of a thing that was almost tragedy.
Oachi loved him. He could see that love in her eyes, in her movement; he
could feel it in her presence, and the sweet song of it trembled in her
voice when she spoke to him. Ordinarily a white man would have accepted
this love; he would have rejoiced in it, and would have played with it for
a time, as they have done with the loves of the women of Oachi's people
since the beginning of white man's time. But Roscoe Cummins was of a
different type. He was a man of ideals, and in Oachi's love he saw his
ideal of love set apart from him by illimitable voids. This night, in the
firelit tepee, there came to him like a painful stab the truth of Ransom's
words. He had been born some thousands of years too late. He saw in Oachi
love and life as they might have been for him; but beyond them he also saw,
like a grim and threatening hand, a vision of cities, of toiling millions,
of a great work just begun--a vision of life as it was intended that he
should live it; and to shut it out from him he bowed his head in his two
hands, overwhelmed by a new grief.

The chief sat with his face to the fire, smoking silently, and Oachi came
to Roscoe's side, and touched hands timidly, like a little child. She
seemed to him wondrously like a child when he lifted his head and looked
down into her face. She smiled at him, questioning him, and he smiled his
answer back, yet neither broke the silence with words. He heard only the
soft little note in Oachi's throat that filled him with such an exquisite
sensation, and he wondered what music would be if it could find expression
through a voice like hers.

"Oachi," he asked softly, "why did you never sing?"

The girl looked at him in silence for a moment.

"We starve," she said. She swept her hand toward the door of the tepee. "We
starve--die--there is no song."

He put his hand under her chin and lifted her face to him, as he might h