ic
future of those who will not see, because to see is to suffer?--she
made some quaint, odd motions of the body which belonged to a mysterious
dance of her tribe, and, with flashing eyes, challenged the comely old
woman seated on a pile of deer-skins.

"It is morning, and the day will last for ever," she said nonchalantly,
but her eyes suddenly took on a faraway look, half apprehensive, half
wondering. The birds were indeed going south very soon, yet had there
ever been so exquisite an autumn as this, had her man ever had so
wonderful a trade--her man with the brown hair, blue eyes, and fair,
strong face?

"The birds go south, but the hunters and buffalo still go north,"
Mitiahwe urged searchingly, looking hard at her mother--Oanita, the
Swift Wing.

"My dream said that the winter will be dark and lonely, that the ice
will be thick, the snow deep, and that many hearts will be sick because
of the black days and the hunger that sickens the heart," answered Swift
Wing.

Mitiahwe looked into Swift Wing's dark eyes, and an anger came upon her.
"The hearts of cowards will freeze," she rejoined, "and to those that
will not see the sun the world will be dark," she added. Then suddenly
she remembered to whom she was speaking, and a flood of feeling ran
through her; for Swift Wing had cherished her like a fledgeling in the
nest till her young white man came from "down East." Her heart had leapt
up at sight of him, and she had turned to him from all the young men of
her tribe, waiting in a kind of mist till he, at last, had spoken to
her mother, and then one evening, her shawl over her head, she had come
along to his lodge.

A thousand times as the four years passed by she had thought how good
it was that she had become his wife--the young white man's wife, rather
than the wife of Breaking Rock, son of White Buffalo, the chief, who
had four hundred horses, and a face that would have made winter and
sour days for her. Now and then Breaking Rock came and stood before the
lodge, a distance off, and stayed there hour after hour, and once or
twice he came when her man was with her; but nothing could be done,
for earth and air and space were common to them all, and there was no
offence in Breaking Rock gazing at the lodge where Mitiahwe lived. Yet
it seemed as though Breaking Rock was waiting--waiting and hoping.
That was the impression made upon all who saw him, and even old White
Buffalo, the chief, shook his head gloomily whe