Meta, the little cow-girl, the youngest and fairest, though many shades the darkest, of the Meadows household, was not of the Meadows blood. On her father's side, her ancestry, doubtless, was uncertain; some said carelessly, "Canada French." Her mother was pure squaw of the Bannock breed. But Mother Meadows, whose warm Scotch-Irish heart nourished a vein of romance together with a feudal love of family, upheld that Meta was no chance slip of the murky half-bloods, neither clean wild nor clean tame. Her father, she claimed to know, had been a man of education and of honor, on the white side of his life, a well-born Scottish gentleman, exiled to the wilderness of the Northwest in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company. And Meta's mother had broken no law of her rudimentary conscience. She had not swerved in her own wild allegiance, nor suffered desertion by her white chief. He had been killed in some obscure frontier fight, and his goods, including the woman and child, were the stake for which he had perished. But Father Josette, who knew all things and all people of those parts, and had baptized the infant by the sainted name of Margaret, had traced his lost plant of grace and conveyed it out of the forest shades into the sunshine of a Christian white woman's home. Father Josette--so Mrs. Meadows maintained--had known that the babe would prove worthy of transplantation. She made room for the little black-headed stranger, with soft eyes like a mouse (by the blessing of God she had never lost a child, and the nest was full,) in the midst of her own fat, fair-haired brood, and cherished her in her place, and gave her a daughter's privilege. In a wild, woodlandish way Meta was a bit of an heiress in her own right. She had inherited through her mother a share in the yearly increase of a band of Bannock ponies down on the Salmon meadows; and every season, after grand round-up, the settlement was made,--always with distinct fairness, though it took some time, and a good deal of eating, drinking, and diplomacy, before the business could be accomplished. "What is a matter of a field worth forty shekels betwixt thee and me?" was the etiquette of the transaction, but the outcome was practically the same as in the days of patriarchal transfers of real estate.