Meanwhile little Mary, the heroine of this intrigue, was eating soup and sucking a bone contentedly. Would she be an Indian or an English maiden? She was an Indian one now and happy, too. And Nikumi? She had come to her white husband and remained with him contented and happy. He had been good to her in the main, although he swore at her and abused her sometimes when he got drunk or played at cards too long, but he was better than the braves were to their squaws, and she did not have to work as they did; she had wood and food and she could buy at the trading post the blankets and the strouding and the gay red cloths, and the beads with which the squaws delighted to adorn their necks and to stitch with deer sinew into their moccasins. She had lived each day unconscious that there might not be a tomorrow like it. But it had dropped from the skies, this sudden knowledge that had changed everything. Had she had no child she would doubtless have mourned silently for the man who had come and taken her life to be lived beside his and then left her worse than alone; but the greater blow had deadened the force of the lesser, and only her outraged mother love cried out. She sat on the buffalo robe inside the tipi and watched the child rolling about outside with the little fat puppy, hugging it one moment, savagely spatting it over the eyes the next. She had no right to rebel; an Indian did what he would with his squaw, how much more a white man, and to any decree concerning herself she would doubtless have submitted silently, but to lose her child--that she would not do, and she knew how to save it. All unconscious of this intrigue, Gale made his preparations for departure, and it was soon known through the camp that he was about to go to the "states." He had taken pains to conceal the fact of his intended final departure for England. He secretly made arrangements with the man who acted as cook for the boats to take charge of little Mary until they got to St. Louis, where they could get a servant, and going down the river would take but a few days.