Joel Renton had made money, by good luck chiefly,
having held land here and there which he had got for nothing, and had
then almost forgotten about it, and, when reminded of it, still held on
to it with that defiant stubbornness which often possesses improvident
and careless natures. He had never had any real business instinct, and
to swagger a little over the land he held and to treat offers of purchase
with contempt was the loud assertion of a capacity he did not possess.
So it was that stubborn vanity, beneath which was his angry protest
against the prejudice felt by the new people of the West for the white
pioneer who married an Indian, and lived the Indian life,--so it was that
this gave him competence and a comfortable home after the old trader had
been driven out by the railway and the shopkeeper. With the first land
he sold he sent his daughter away to school in a town farther east and
south, where she had been brought in touch with a life that at once
cramped and attracted her; where, too, she had felt the first chill
of racial ostracism, and had proudly fought it to the end, her weapons
being talent, industry, and a hot, defiant ambition.
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