There had been three years of bitter, almost half-sullen, struggle,
lightened by one sweet friendship with a girl whose face she had since
drawn in a hundred different poses on stray pieces of paper, on the walls
of the big, well-lighted attic to which she retreated for hours every
day, when she was not abroad on the prairies, riding the Indian pony that
her uncle the Piegan Chief, Ice Breaker, had given her years before.
Three years of struggle, and then her father had died, and the refuge for
her vexed, defiant heart was gone. While he lived she could affirm the
rights of a white man's daughter, the rights of the daughter of a pioneer
who had helped to make the West; and her pride in him had given a glow to
her cheek and a spring to her step which drew every eye. In the chief
street of Portage la Drome men would stop their trafficking and women
nudge each other when she passed, and wherever she went she stirred
interest, excited admiration, or aroused prejudice--but the prejudice did
not matter so long as her father, Joel Renton, lived. Whatever his
faults, and they were many--sometimes he drank too much, and swore a
great deal, and bullied and stormed--she blinked at them all, for he was
of the conquering race, a white man who had slept in white sheets and
eaten off white tablecloths, and used a knife and fork, since he was
born; and the women of his people had had soft petticoats and fine
stockings, and silk gowns for festal days, and feathered hats of velvet,
and shoes of polished leather, always and always, back through many
generations.
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