His people would be ashamed of me,"

"Don't be silly! There isn't any man or any family too good for you--I doubt if there is any good enough for you."

"You're a dear, but the fact remains that they are stiff- backed Bostonians with more culture than there is in the whole state that I came from and a family tree that started as a seedling in the Garden of Eden, while I got most of my education out of a mail order catalog; and if I ever had a family tree it must have been blown away by a Kansas cyclone while my folks were fighting Indians.

"And speaking of Indians, whom do you think I saw today?"

"Who?"

"Shoz-Dijiji!"

Margaret Cullis looked up quickly. Was it the intonation of the girl's voice as she spoke the name! The older woman frowned and looked down at her work again. "What did he have to say?" she asked.

"Nothing."

"Oh, you didn't see him to talk with?"

"Yes, but he wouldn't talk to me. He just fell back on that maddening 'No sabe' that they use with strangers."

"Why do you suppose he did that?" asked Mrs. Cullis.

"I hurt him the last time I saw him," replied Wichita.

"Hurt one of Geronimo's renegades! Child, it can't be done."

"They're human!" replied the girl. "I learned that in the days that I spent in Geronimo's camp while Chief Loco was out with his hostiles. Among themselves they are entirely different people from those we are accustomed to see on the reservation. No one who has watched them with their children, seen them at their games, heard them praying to Dawn and Twilight, to the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars as they cast their sacred hoddentin to the winds would ever again question their possession of the finer instincts of sentiment and imagination.

"Because they do not wear their hearts upon their sleeves, because they are not blatant in the declaration of their finer emotions, does not mean that they feel no affection or that they are incapable of experiencing spiritual suffering."

"Perhaps," said Margaret Cullis j "but you, who have lived in Indian country all your life, who have seen the heartless cruelties they inflict upon their helpless victims, who know their treachery and their dishonesty, cannot but admit that whatever qualities of goodness they possess are far outweighed by those others which have made them hated and feared the length and breadth of the Southwest."

"For every wrong that they have committed," argued Wichita, "they can point out a similar crime perpetrated upon them by the whites. 0, Margaret, it is the old case again of the pot calling the kettle black. We have tortured them and wronged them even more than they have tortured and wronged us.

"We esteem personal comfort and life as our two most sacred possessions. When the Apaches torture and kill us we believe that they have committed against us the most hideous of conceivable crimes.

"On the other hand the Apaches do not esteem personal comfort and life as highly as do we and consequently, by their standards--and we may judge a people justly only by their own standards--we have not suffered as much as they, who esteem more highly than life or personal comfort the sanctity of their ancient rites and customs and the chastity of their women. From the time of the white man's first contact with the Apaches he has ridiculed the one and defiled the other.

"I have talked with Shoz-Dijiji, and Geronimo, with Sons- ee-ah-ray, and many another Be-don-ko-he man and woman; they have laid bare their hearts to me, and never again can anyone convince me that we have not tortured the Apaches with as malignant cruelty as they have tortured us."

"Why you are a regular little Apache yourself, Wichita," cried Margaret Cullis. "I wonder what your father would say if he could hear you."

"He has heard me. Don't think for a minute that I am afraid to express my views to anyone."

"Did he enjoy them and agree with you?"

"He did not. He did everything but tear his hair and take me out to the woodshed. You know Mason was killed about two months ago, and it had all the ear-marks of an Apache killing. Mason was one of Dad's best friends. Now, every time he thinks or hears Apache he sees red."

"I don't blame him," said Margaret Cullis.

"It's silly," snapped Wichita, "and I tell him so. It would be just as logical to hate all French-Canadians because Guiteau assassinated President Garfield."

"Well, how in the world, feeling toward the Apaches as you do, could you have found it in your heart to so wound Shoz-Dijiji that he will not speak to you?"

"I did not mean to," explained the girl. "It--just happened. We had been together for many days after the Chi-e-a-hen attacked the Pringe ranch and Shoz-Dijiji got me away from them. The country was full of hostiles, and so he took me to the safest place he could think of--the Be- don-ko-he camp. They kept me there until they were sure that all the hostiles had crossed the border into Mexico. He was lovely to me--a white man could have been no more considerate--but when he got me home again and was about to leave me he told me that he loved me.

"I don't know what it was, Margaret--inherited instinct, perhaps--but the thought of it revolted me, and he must have seen it in my face. He went away, and I never saw him again--until today--three years."

The older woman looked up quickly from her work. There had been a note in the girl's voice as she spoke those last two words that aroused sudden apprehension in the breast of Margaret Cullis.

"Wichita," she demanded, "do you love this--this Apache?"

"Margaret," replied the girl, "you have been like a sister to me, or a mother. No one else could ask me that question. I have not even dared ask myself." She paused. "No, I cannot love him!"

"It would be unthinkable that you would love an Indian, Wichita," said the older woman. "It would cut you off forever from your own kind and would win you only the contempt of the Indians.