gown and blanket, with only a string of beads around her throat, she
was as pretty as any one here. And I dare say she could be educated and
appear as well as any white woman. I should so like to have you see her.
I would have tried to bring her to the fort, but the braves are very
jealous of their wives or daughters seeing white men, you know, and I
was afraid of the colonel."
She had spoken volubly and with a strange excitement, but even at the
moment her face changed again, and as she left the office, with a quick
laugh and parting gesture, there were tears in her eyes.
Accustomed to her moods and caprices, Peter thought little of the
intrusion, relieved as he was of his first fears. She had come to him
from loneliness and curiosity, and, perhaps, he thought with a sad
smile, from a little sisterly jealousy of the young girl who had evinced
such an interest in him, and had known him before. He took up his pen
and continued the interrupted paragraph of his report.
"I am satisfied that much of the mischievous and extravagant prejudice
against the half breed and all alliances of the white and red
races springs from the ignorance of the frontiersman and his hasty
generalization of facts. There is no doubt that an intermixture of blood
brings out purely superficial contrasts the more strongly, and that
against the civilizing habits and even costumes of the half breed,
certain Indian defects appear the more strongly as in the case of the
color line of the quadroon and octoroon, but it must not be forgotten
that these are only the contrasts of specific improvement, and the
inference that the borrowed defects of a half breed exceed the original
defects of the full-blooded aborigine is utterly illogical." He stopped
suddenly and laid down his pen with a heightened color; the bugle had
blown, the guard was turning out to receive the commandant and his
returning party, among whom was Friddy.
*****
Through the illusions of depression and distance the "sink" of Butternut
Creek seemed only an incrustation of blackish moss on the dull gray
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