"Who?" said Susan, answering him for the first time.
"The white men. They're creeping along out of their country into this, pushing the frontier forward every year, and going on ahead of it with their tents and their cattle and their women. Watch the way that train comes after Red Feather's village. That was all scattered and broken, going every way like a lot of glass beads rolling down the hill. This comes slow, but it's steady and sure as fate."
She thought for a moment, watching the emigrants, and then said:
"It moves like soldiers."
"Conquerors. That's what they are. They're going to roll over everything—crush them out."
"Over the Indians?"
"That's it. Drive 'em away into the cracks of the mountains, wipe them out the way the trappers are wiping out the beaver."
"Cruel!" she said hotly. "I don't believe it."
"Cruel?" he gave her a look of half-contemptuous amusement. "Maybe so, but why should you blame them for that? Aren't you cruel when you kill an antelope or a deer for supper? They're not doing you any harm, but you just happen to be hungry. Well, those fellers are hungry—land hungry—and they've come for the Indian's land. The whole world's cruel. You know it, but you don't like to think so, so you say it isn't. You're just lying because you're afraid of the truth."
She looked angrily at him and met the gray eyes. In the center of each iris was a dot of pupil so clearly defined and hard that they looked to Susan like the heads of black pins. "That's exactly what he'd say," she thought; "he's no better than a savage." What she said was: