d the
shopkeeper. With the first land he sold he sent his daughter away to
school in a town farther east and south, where she had been brought in
touch with a life that at once cramped and attracted her; where, too,
she had felt the first chill of racial ostracism, and had proudly fought
it to the end, her weapons being talent, industry, and a hot, defiant
ambition.

There had been three years of bitter, almost half-sullen, struggle,
lightened by one sweet friendship with a girl whose face she had since
drawn in a hundred different poses on stray pieces of paper, on the
walls of the big, well-lighted attic to which she retreated for hours
every day, when she was not abroad on the prairies, riding the Indian
pony that her uncle the Piegan Chief, Ice Breaker, had given her years
before. Three years of struggle, and then her father had died, and the
refuge for her vexed, defiant heart was gone. While he lived she could
affirm the rights of a white man's daughter, the rights of the daughter
of a pioneer who had helped to make the West; and her pride in him had
given a glow to her cheek and a spring to her step which drew every eye.
In the chief street of Portage la Drome men would stop their trafficking
and women nudge each other when she passed, and wherever she went she
stirred interest, excited admiration, or aroused prejudice--but the
prejudice did not matter so long as her father, Joel Renton, lived.
Whatever his faults, and they were many--sometimes he drank too much,
and swore a great deal, and bullied and stormed--she blinked at them
all, for he was of the conquering race, a white man who had slept in
white sheets and eaten off white tablecloths, and used a knife and fork,
since he was born; and the women of his people had had soft petticoats
and fine stockings, and silk gowns for festal days, and feathered
hats of velvet, and shoes of polished leather, always and always, back
through many generations. She had held her head high, for she was of his
women, of the women of his people, with all their rights and all their
claims. She had held it high till that stormy day--just such a day
as this, with the surf of snow breaking against the house--when they
carried him in out of the wild turmoil and snow, laying him on the couch
where she now sat, and her head fell on his lifeless breast, and she
cried out to him in vain to come back to her.

Before the world her head was still held high, but in the attic-room,
and out