pigs!" she cried.

Suddenly she made for the nearest, brandishing her staff. They
scattered, laughing.

Bela returned to the teepee, head held high. Her mother, a patient,
stolid squaw, still sat as she had left her, hands motionless in the
dough. Bela stood for a moment, breathing hard, her face working
oddly.

Suddenly she flung herself on the ground in a tempest of weeping. Her
startled mother stared at her uncomprehendingly. For an Indian woman
to cry is rare enough; to cry in a moment of triumph, unheard of. Bela
was strange to her own mother.

"Pigs! Pigs! Pigs!" she cried between sobs. "I hate them! I not know
what pigs are till I see them in the sty at the mission. Then I think
of these people! Pigs they are! I hate them! They not my people!"

Loseis, with a jerk like an automaton, recommenced kneading the dough.

Bela raised a streaming, accusing face to her mother.

"What for you take a man like that?" she cried passionately. "A
weasel, a mouse, a flea of a man! A dog is more of a man than he! He
run from me squeaking like a puppy!"

"My mother gave me to him," murmured the squaw apologetically.

"You took him!" cried Bela. "You go with him! Was he the best man you
could get? I jump in the lake before I shame my children with a coyote
for a father!"

Loseis looked strangely at her daughter. "Charley not your father,"
she said abruptly.

Bela pulled up short in the middle of her passionate outburst, stared
at her mother with fallen jaw.

"You twenty year old," went on Loseis. "Nineteen year I marry Charley.
I have another husband before that."

"Why you never tell me?" murmured Bela, amazed.

"So long ago!" Loseis replied with a shrug. "What's the use?"

Bela's tears were effectually called in. "Tell me, what kind of man my
father?" she eagerly demanded.

"He was a white man."

"A white man!" repeated Bela, staring. There was a silence in the
teepee while it sunk in. A deep rose mantled the girl's cheeks.

"What he called?" she asked.

"Walter Forest." On the Indian woman's tongue it was "Hoo-alter."

"Real white?" demanded Bela.

"His skin white as a dog's tooth," answered Loseis, "his hair bright
like the sun." A gleam in the dull eyes as she said this suggested
that the stolid squaw was human, too.

"Was he good to you?"

"He was good to me. Not like Indian husband. He like dress me up fine.
All the time laugh and make jokes. He call me 'Tagger-Leelee.'"

"Did he go away?"