he moaned. "But I am still a Pariah,—an outcast from my own people. What will my dear mother think of me when John acquaints her with the facts? What will my father say or do?"
It is well that Mother Nature, in her wisdom and mercy, has provided a limit to human suffering, else everybody in this world would at times become insane.
Cicadas gave* forth their rasping notes in the dry grass, and a colony of prairie dogs played hide-and-seek over the uneven streets above an underground settlement hard by. *A badger peeped cautiously from the mouth of his sagebrush-guarded den, and a rattlesnake crawled unnoticed past his feet.
"I don't blame John for being disappointed and angry," he said aloud, "but I am amazed at his lack of charity. If he could have seen and known Wahnetta as I did, at the time of our marriage, he would have been pleased with my choice. But it is too late now. Her girlish grace and beauty are gone, and one could hardly distinguish her from any of the other pappoose-burdened, camas-digging squaws that abound in spots in the land of the Latter-Day Saints. I might send her back, with the children, to the remnant of her tribe among the Bad Lands, but the act would be infamous. No, Joseph Ranger; you must take your medicine."
He thought of his joyous exultation at the time he had won the accomplished and graceful Indian princess, whom half-a-dozen distinguished braves and as many handsome white traders had sought in marriage; of her trusting preference for him; of their joyous honeymoon; and of the herd of beautiful horses with which he had purchased her for his chosen bride, thus making her a slave. He winced as he thought of the legal status of his wife and children.
He blushed with shame as he thought of her loyalty to him through all the years of her transformation from a lithe and pretty maiden of sixteen, whom every man
