at the thought. And yet why should he? Was she not as good as he? Had all her years of faithful servitude counted for nothing?
A meal of boiled buffalo meat and vegetables, with bread, coffee, butter, and eggs, was waiting on a table of rough boards resting on trestles, and covered with an oilcloth that had once been white.
In one comer, beside a big sheet-iron cook-stove, sat, or rather crouched, the woman whom he had made his wife. She was not yet thirty years of age, but all traces of her girlish youth and beauty of face and figure were gone. Her dress, a cheap and garish print, was open at the neck and arms, and hung in slovenly folds about her fat form and moccasined feet.
"Why in thunder don't you keep yourself and the young ones clean and dressed up?" asked her husband, as he dropped into his seat at table. "You keep yourself like a Digger squaw!"
"I should belie the customs of my people if I aped the airs of white folks when I must live like an Indian, Joseph Addicks!" said the woman, in well-modulated English, as she arose and approached the table, coffee-pot in hand.
"I loathe and abhor the very sight of you!" he exclaimed with a savage glare.
"You didn't talk like that when I was young and pretty, Joseph! If you had tried it once, you would not have had a chance to repeat it then. Perhaps," she added bitterly, a moment later, as she filled his plate, "perhaps I could have retained my charms if you had taken me back to London and kept me within the pale of civilization in which I was educated. You said before you married me that you would take me back to Canada, where you said your people lived, who would be glad to welcome me. How well you have kept your promise let these surroundings answer. I married you believing that your people would be my people, and your God my God. And," looking around her, "this is the result!"
