Now, Sally Tumlin had no convictions about life but that the world owed her “a home of her own.” Her mother had forged the bolt of this particular maxim at an early date. And Sally saw from precocious observation that the business of women was home-getting, to which end they must be neat and sweet and sparing of speech. After the home was forthcoming, then, indeed, might a woman take ease in slippers and wrapper, and it is surely a wife’s privilege to speak her mind. Sally knew that she hated travelling westward after the crawling oxen; each day the sun pursued them, caught up with them, outdistanced them, and at night left them stranded in the wilderness, and rose again and mocked them on the morrow. Her father and oafish brother loved the makeshifts of the wagon life, with its chance shots at fleeing antelope, scurrying sage-hens, and bounding cotton-tails; a chance parley with a stray Indian but added zest to the game of chance. But Sally hated it all. The cabin on Elder Creek had a tight roof; Warren Rodney had money in the bank. He had had uncommon luck at trapping. His talk to Sally was largely of his prospects. Sally knew that the world owed her “a home of her own”; and why should she let a squaw keep her from it? Sally’s mother giggled when consulted. She plainly regarded the squaw as a rival of her daughter. The ethics of the case, as far as Mrs. Tumlin was concerned, was merely a question of white skin against brown, and which should carry the day. Singing Stream knew not one word of the talk, much of which occurred in her very presence, that threatened to pull her home about her ears, but she knew that Sally was taking her man from her. The white-skinned woman wore white ruffles about her neck and calico dresses that were the color of the wild roses that grew among the willows at the creek. Sally Tumlin’s pink calico gowns sowed a crop of nettles in the mind of the squaw. It was the rainbow things, she felt, that were robbing her of her man. All her barbaric craving for glowing colors asserted itself as a means towards the one great end of keeping him. Singing Stream began to scheme schemes. One day Rodney was splitting wood at the Tumlin camp—though why he should split wood where there were two women puzzled the squaw. But the ways of the pale-faces were beyond her ken. She only knew that she must make herself beautiful in the eyes of Warren Rodney, like this devil woman, and then perhaps the pappoose that she expected with the first snowfall would be a man-child; and she hoped great things of this happening.