"Did ye now? Well, good riddance to them. They ha' been loafing around the Kootenai village ever since I sent them from the cabin in the summer. That Talapa was a sleepy-eyed bit o' old Nick. I told Genesee that same from the first, when he was wasting his stock o' pity on her. Ye see," he said, turning his speech to Stuart, "a full-blooded Siwash has some redeeming points, and a character o' their own; but the half-breeds are a part white an' a part red, with a good wheen o' the devil's temper thrown in."
"She didn't appear to have much of the last this morning," observed Rachel. "She looked pretty miserable."
"Ah, well, tak' the best o' them, an' they look that to the whites. An' so they're flittin' to the Reservation to live off the Government? Skulking Bob'll be too lazy to be even takin' the chance o' fightin' with his people against the Blackfeet, if trouble should come; and there's been many a straggler from the rebels makin' their way north to the Blackfeet, an' that is like to breed mischief."
"And your friend is at Owens?"
"Yes—or thereabouts. One o' the foremost o' their scouts, they tell me, an' a rare good one he is, with no prejudice on either side o' the question."
"I should think, being a white man, his sympathies would lean toward his own race," observed Stuart.
"Well, that's as may chance. There's many the man who finds his best friends in strange blood. Genesee is thought no little of among the Kootenais—more, most like, than he would be where he was born and bred. Folk o' the towns know but little how to weigh a man."
"And is he from the cities?"
For the first time Davy MacDougall looked up quickly.
"I know not," he answered briefly, "an', not giving to you a short answer, I care not. Few questions make long friends in the hills."