In one corner, beside a big sheet-iron cook-stove, sat, or rather crouched, the woman whom he had made his wife. She was not yet thirty years of age, but all traces of her girlish youth and beauty of face and figure were gone. Her dress, a cheap and garish print, was open at the neck and arms, and hung in slovenly folds about her fat form and moccasined feet. “Why in thunder don’t you keep yourself and the young ones clean and dressed up?” asked her husband, as he dropped into his seat at table. “You keep yourself like a Digger squaw!” “I should belie the customs of my people if I aped the airs of white folks when I must live like an Indian, Joseph Addicks!” said the woman, in well-modulated English, as she arose and approached the table, coffee-pot in hand. “I loathe and abhor the very sight of you!” he exclaimed with a savage glare. “You didn’t talk like that when I was young and pretty, Joseph! If you had tried it once, you would not have had a chance to repeat it then. Perhaps,” she added bitterly, a moment later, as she filled his plate, “perhaps I could have retained my charms if you had taken me back to London and kept me within the pale of civilization in which I was educated. You said before you married me that you would take me back to Canada, where you said your people lived, who would be glad to welcome me. How well you have kept your promise let these surroundings answer. I married you believing that your people would be my people, and your God my God. And,” looking around her, “this is the result!” The sleeves of her gaudy dress were rolled back above the elbows, exposing her fat yet muscular arms, not over-clean; and the dingy pipe she had been smoking protruded from the open bosom of her gown. “Where have you been during all this busy afternoon, Joseph?” she asked, still standing. “To hell!” “Your missionaries have taught me that people only go to hell from choice, Joseph; that is, if there is any worse hell anywhere than we are in all the time,—which I love the Great Spirit too well to believe. It seems to me we are compelled to take the punishment we bring upon ourselves here and now.” “You haven’t any right to think, you loathsome, disgusting—” “Stop, Joseph Addicks! This is, you say, a white man’s country now. Will you prove it by behaving yourself like a gentleman? I didn’t live for four years in a white man’s country for nothing.” He arose and left the table without a word. His wife had seen him in moods like this before. “Come, John; come, Annie; take your seats at table. You must be half famished.” Four or five smaller children as dusky as herself were playing on the earthen floor; and, leaning helplessly against a pyramid of flour sacks, lashed in Indian style to its birchen cradle, was a pappoose of three months, defencelessly enduring an attack of mosquitoes on its face and eyes.