As she sewed she sung in a low undervoice, not looking up. Beyond her in the shade Daddy John mended a piece of harness. Daddy John was not a garrulous person and when she paused in her sewing to speak to him, he answered with a monosyllable. It was one of the old man's self-appointed duties to watch over her when the others were absent. If he did not talk much to his "Missy" he kept a vigilant eye upon her, and to-day he squatted in the shade beside her because the doctor and David had gone after antelope and Leff was off somewhere on an excursion of his own.

Susan, sewing, her face grave above her work, was not as pretty as Susan smiling. She drew her eyebrows, thick and black, low over her eyes with her habitual concentration in the occupation of the moment, and her lips, pressed together, pouted, but not the disarming baby pout which, when she was angry, made one forget the sullenness of her brows. Her looks however, were of that fortunate kind which lose nothing from the open air and large backgrounds. Dress added but little to such attractions as she had. Fineness and elegance were not hers, but her healthy, ripe brownness fitted into this sylvan setting where the city beauty would have soon become a pale and draggled thing.

The robust blood of her French Canadian forebears was quickening to the call of the trail. Was it the spirit of her adventurous ancestors that made her feel a kinship with the wild, an indifference to its privations, a joy in its rude liberty? She was thinner, but stronger and more vigorous than when the train had started. She talked less and yet her whole being seemed more vibrantly alive, her glance to have gained the gleaming quietness of those whose eyes scan vague horizons. She who had been heavy on her feet now stepped with a light noiselessness, and her body showed its full woman's outlines straightened and lengthened to the litheness of a boy. Her father noticed that the Gallic strain in her seemed to be crowding out the other. In Rochester, under city roofs, she had been at least half his. On the trail, with the arch of the sky above and the illimitable earth around her, she was throwing back to her mother's people.

Susan herself had no interest in these atavistic developments. She was a healthy, uncomplicated, young animal, and she was enjoying herself as she had never done before. Behind her the life of Rochester stretched in a tranquil perspective of dull and colorless routine. Nothing had ever happened. From her seventh year her father and Daddy John had brought her up, made her the pet and plaything of their lonely lives, rejoiced in her, wondered at her, delighted in the imperious ways she had learned from their spoiling. There had been teachers to educate her, but it was an open secret that they had not taught her much. Susan did not take kindly to books. No one had ever been able to teach her how to cipher and learning the piano had been a fruitless effort abandoned in her fifteenth year. It is only just to her to say that she had her little talents. She was an excellent housekeeper, and she could cook certain dishes better, the doctor said, than the chefs in some of the fine restaurants in New York City.

But what were the sober pleasures of housekeeping and cooking beside the rough, deep-living exhilaration of gypsy life on the plains! She looked back pityingly at those days of stagnant peace, compared the entertainment to be extracted from embroidering a petticoat frill to the exultant joy of a ride in the morning over the green swells. Who would sip tea in the close curtained primness of the parlor when they could crouch by the camp fire and eat a corn cake baked on the ashes or drink brown coffee from a tin cup? And her buffalo robe on the ground, the blanket tucked round her shoulder, the rustling of furtive animal life in the grass outside the tent wall - was there any comparison between its comfort and that of her narrow white bed at home, between the clean sheets of which she had snuggled so luxuriously?