. She waited until
it was his pleasure to speak.

"Annie, I want you to keep away from Bill Holmes." Luck was not one to
mince his words when he had occasion to speak of disagreeable things.
"It isn't right for you to let him make love to you on the sly. You know
that. You know you must not leave camp with him after dark. You make me
ashamed of you when you do those things. You keep away from Bill Holmes
and stay in camp nights. If you're a bad girl, I'll have to send you
back to the reservation--and I'll have to tell the agent and Chief
Big Turkey why I send you back. I can't have anybody in my company who
doesn't act right. Now remember--don't make me speak to you again about
it."

Annie-Many-Ponies stood there, and the veiled, look was in her eyes.
Her face was a smooth, brown mask--beautiful to look upon but as
expressionless as the dead. She did not protest her innocence, she did
not explain that she hated and distrusted Bill Holmes and that she
had, months ago, repelled his surreptitious advances. Luck would have
believed, for he had known Annie-Many-Ponies since she was a barefooted
papoose, and he had never known her to tell him an untruth.

"You go now and get ready for work. Wear the moccasins with the birds on
the toes." He pointed to them and turned away.

Annie-Many-Ponies also turned and went her way and said nothing. What,
indeed, could she say? She did not doubt that Luck had seen her the
night before, and had seen also Bill Holmes when he left camp or
returned--perhaps both. She could not tell him that Bill Holmes had gone
out to meet Ramon, for that, she felt instinctively, was a secret which
Ramon trusted her not to betray. She could not tell Wagalexa Conka,
either, that she met Ramon often when the camp was asleep. He would
think that as bad as meeting Bill Holmes. She knew that he did not
like Ramon, but merely used him and his men and horses and cattle for
a price, to better his pictures. Save in a purely business way she had
never seen him talking with Ramon. Never as he talked with the boys of
the Flying U--his Happy Family, he called them.

She said nothing. She dressed for the part she was to play. She
twined flowers in her hair and smoothed out the red bows and laid them
carefully away--since Wagalexa Conka did not wish her to wear ribbon
bows in this picture. She murmured caresses to Shunka Chistala, the
little black dog that was always at her heels. She rode with the company
to the roc