SUSIE’S INDIAN BLOOD
Coming leisurely up the path from the corrals, Smith saw Susie sitting on the cottonwood log, wrapped in her mother’s blanket. She was huddled in a squaw’s attitude. He eyed her; he never had seen her like that before. But, knowing Indians better, possibly, than he knew his own race, Smith understood. He recognized the mood. Her Indian blood was uppermost. It rose in most half-breeds upon occasion. Sometimes under the influence of liquor it cropped out, sometimes anger brought it to the surface. He had seen it often—this heavy, smouldering sullenness.
Smith stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at her. He felt more at ease with her than ever before.
“What are you sullin’ about, Susie?”
She did not answer. Her pertness, her Anglo-Saxon vivacity, were gone; her face was wooden, expressionless; her restless eyes slow-moving and dull; her cheek-bones, always noticeably high, looked higher, and her skin was murky and dark.
“You look like a squaw with that sull on,” he ventured again, and there was satisfaction in his face.
It was something to know that, after all, Susie was “Injun”—“pure Injun.” The scheme which had lain dormant in his brain now took active shape. He had wanted Susie’s help, but each time that he had tried to conciliate her, his overtures had ended in a fresh rupture. Now her stinging tongue was dumb, and there was no aggressiveness in her manner.
Smith, laying his hand heavily upon her shoulder, sat down beside her, and a flash, a transitory gleam, shone for an instant in her dull eyes; but she did not move or change expression.
He said in a low voice:
“What you need is stirrin’ up, Susie.”