Racially mixed people -- Fiction; Western stories; Wyoming -- Fiction
With such primitive reasoning did Singing Stream put the horses to the
light wagon, and, taking the little Judith with her, drove to Deadwood,
a matter of two hundred miles, to buy the bright calicoes that were to
make her like a white woman. It never occurred to the half-breed woman
to make known her plans to Warren Rodney. In circumventing Sally Tumlin
the man became the spoils of war, and it is not the Indian way to tell
plans on the war-trail. So the squaw left her kingdom in the hands of
the enemy, without a word.
Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney looked upon the disappearance of the
squaw in the light of a providential solution of the difficulties
attending their romance. They admitted it was square of her to “hit the
trail,” and they decided to lose no time in going to the army post,
where a chaplain, an Indian missionary, happened to be staying at the
time, and have a real wedding, with a ring and a fee to the parson. The
wedding party started for the post, old mother Tumlin fluttering about
the bride as complacently as if the ceremony had been the culmination
of the most decorous courtship. The oafish brother drove the bridal
party, making crude jests by-the-way, to the frank delight of the
prospective groom and the giggling protestations of the bride. The
chaplain at the post was disposed to ask few questions. Parsons made
queer marriages in those tumultuous days, and it was regarded as a
patent of worthy motives that the pair should call in the man of the
gospel at all. To the question whether or not he had been married
before, Rodney answered:
“Well, parson, this is the first time I have ever stood up for a life
sentence.” And the ceremony proceeded.
Some of the ladies at the post, hearing that there was to be a wedding,
dropped in and added their smiles and flutterings to the rather grim
party; among them, Mrs. Atkins, who had just come to the post as a
bride. They even added a trifle or two from their own store of pretty
things, as presents to Sally. And Miss Tumlin left the post Mrs. Warren
Rodney, with “a home of her own” to go to.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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