The reply came slowly and sullenly--
"I am a Blackfoot woman. I lived on the Muskwat River among the braves
for thirty years. I have killed buffalo. I have seen battles. Men, too, I
have killed when they came to steal our horses and crept in on our lodges
in the night-the Crees! I am a Blackfoot. You are the daughter of a
Blackfoot woman. No medicine can cure that. Sit down. You have no sense.
You are not white. They will not have you. Sit down."
The girl's handsome face flushed; she threw up her hands in an agony of
protest. A dreadful anger was in her panting breast, but she could not
speak. She seemed to choke with excess of feeling. For an instant she
stood still, trembling with agitation, then she sat down suddenly on a
great couch covered with soft deerskins and buffalo robes. There was deep
in her the habit of obedience to this sombre but striking woman. She had
been ruled firmly, almost oppressively, and she had not yet revolted.
Seated on the couch, she gazed out of the window at the flying snow, her
brain too much on fire for thought, passion beating like a pulse in all
her lithe and graceful young body, which had known the storms of life and
time for only twenty years.
The wind shrieked and the snow swept past in clouds of blinding drift,
completely hiding from sight the town below them, whose civilisation had
built itself many habitations and was making roads and streets on the
green-brown plain, where herds of buffalo had stamped and streamed and
thundered not long ago.
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