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“I will not stay here,” said the Indian mother, with sullen stubbornness. “I will go back beyond the Warais. My life is my own life, and I will do what I like with it.”

The girl started, but became composed again on the instant. “Is your life all your own, mother?” she asked. “I did not come into the world of my own will. If I had I would have come all white or all Indian. I am your daughter, and I am here, good or bad–is your life all your own?”

“You can marry and stay here, when I go. You are twenty. I had my man, your father, when I was seventeen. You can marry. There are men. You have money. They will marry you–and forget the rest.”

With a cry of rage and misery the girl sprang to her feet and started forward, but stopped suddenly at sound of a hasty knocking and a voice asking admittance. An instant later, a huge, bearded, broad-shouldered man stepped inside, shaking himself free of the snow, laughing half-sheepishly as he did so, and laying his fur cap and gloves with exaggerated care on the wide window-sill.

“John Alloway,” said the Indian woman, in a voice of welcome and with a brightening eye, for it would seem as though he came in answer to her words of a few moments before. With a mother’s instinct she had divined at once the reason for the visit, though no warning thought crossed the mind of the girl, who placed a chair for their visitor with a heartiness which was real–was not this the white man she had saved from death in the snow a year ago? Her heart was soft toward the life she had kept in the world. She smiled at him, all the anger gone from her eyes, and there was almost a touch of tender anxiety in her voice as she said:

“What brought you out in this blizzard? It wasn’t safe. It doesn’t seem possible you got here from the Portage.”

The huge ranchman and auctioneer laughed cheerily. “Once lost, twice get there,” he exclaimed, with a quizzical toss of the head, thinking he had said a good thing. “It’s a year ago to the very day that I was lost out back”–he jerked a thumb over his shoulder–“and you picked me up and brought me in; and what was I to do but come out on the anniversary and say thank you? I’d fixed up all year to come to you, and I wasn’t to be stopped, ’cause it was like the day we first met, old Coldmaker hitting the world with his whips of frost, and shaking his ragged blankets of snow over the wild West.”

“Just such a day,” said the Indian woman, after a pause. Pauline remained silent, placing a little bottle of cordial before their visitor, with which he presently regaled himself, raising his glass with an air.

“Many happy returns to us both!” he said, and threw the liqueur down his throat, smacked his lips, and drew his hand down his great mustache and beard, like some vast animal washing its face with its paw. Smiling, and yet not at ease, he looked at the two women and nodded his head encouragingly, but whether the encouragement was for himself or for them he could not have told.

His last words, however, had altered the situation. The girl had caught at a suggestion in them which startled her. This rough, white plainsman was come to make love to her, and to say–what? He was at once awkward and confident, afraid of her, of her refinement, grace, beauty, and education, and yet confident in the advantage of his position, a white man bending to a half-breed girl. He was not conscious of the condescension and majesty of his demeanor, but it was there, and his untutored words and ways must make it all too apparent to the girl. The revelation of the moment made her at once triumphant and humiliated. This white man had come to make love to her, that was apparent; but that he, ungrammatical, crude, and rough, should think he had but to put out his hand, and she in whom every subtle emotion and influence had delicate response, whose words and ways were as far removed from his as day from night, would fly to him, brought the flush of indignation to her cheek. She responded to his toast with a pleasant nod, however, and said: