Sun Cloud, tossing on her blankets, had flung one of her long braids so that it lay across her mother's breast.

Yellow Bird's slim fingers played with its silken strands as she looked straight up into nothingness.

Wide awake, she was thinking--thinking as Slim Buck--would never be able to think, back to the days when a white woman had been her goddess, and when a little white boy--the woman's son--had called Yellow Bird "my fairy." In the gloom, with foreboding eating at her heart, Yellow Bird's red lips parted in a smile as those days came back to her, for they were pleasing days to think about.

But after that the years sped swiftly in her mind until the day when the little boy--a man grown--came to save her tribe, and her own life, and the life of Sun Cloud, and of Slim Buck her husband.

Since then prosperity and happiness had been her lot.