"Lucy, you're the most hard-hearted girl! Poor Zavier, who's going off into the mountains and may be killed by the Indians. Don't you feel any pity for him? And he's in love with you - truly in love. I've watched him and I know."

She could not refrain from letting a hint of superior wisdom, of an advantage over the unengaged Lucy, give solemnity to her tone.

Lucy's face flushed.

"He's half an Indian," she said with an edge on her voice. "Doesn't everyone in the train keep saying that every ten minutes? Do you want me to fall in love with a man like that?"

"Why no, of course not. You couldn't. That's the sad part of it. He seems as much like other men as those trappers in the fort who were all white. Just because he had a Crow mother it seems unjust that he should be so sort of on the outside of everything. But of course you couldn't marry him. Nobody ever heard of a girl marrying a half-breed."

Lucy bent over the piece of deer meat that she was cutting apart. They were preparing supper at the flaring end of a hot day, when the wagons had crawled through a loose alkaline soil and over myriads of crickets that crushed sickeningly under the wheels. Both girls were tired, their throats parched, their hair as dry as hemp, and Lucy was irritable, her face unsmiling, her movement quick and nervous.

"What's it matter what a man's parents are if he's kind to you?" she said, cutting viciously into the meat. "It's a lot to have some one fill the kettles for you and help you get the firewood, and when you're tired tell you to go back in the wagon and go to sleep. Nobody does that for me but Zavier."

It was the first time she had shown any appreciation of her swain's attentions. She expressed the normal, feminine point of view that her friend had been looking for, and as soon as she heard it Susan adroitly vaulted to the other side:

"But, Lucy, you can't marry him!"

"Who says I'm going to?" snapped Lucy. "Do I have to marry every Indian that makes eyes at me? All the men in the fort were doing it. They hadn't a look for anyone else."

Susan took this with reservations. A good many of the men in the fort had made eyes at her. It was rather grasping of Lucy to take it all to herself, and in her surprise at the extent of her friend's claims she was silent.

"As for me," Lucy went on, "I'm dead sick of this journey. I wish we could stop or go back or do something. But we've got to keep on and on to the end of nowhere. It seems as if we were going forever in these tiresome old wagons or on horses that get lame every other day, and then you have to walk. I don't mind living in a tent. I like it. But I hate always going on, never having a minute to rest, getting up in the morning when I'm only half awake, and having to cook at night when I'm so tired I'd just like to lie down on the ground without taking my clothes off and go to sleep there. I wish I'd never come. I wish I'd married the man in Cooperstown that I wouldn't have wiped my feet on then."