It was Rosebud. Wanaha had expected her, for it was the anniversary of her coming to White River Farm, and the day Ma Sampson had allotted for her birthday.
Wanaha went out to meet her friend. This greeting had been made a hundred times, on the occasion of every visit Rosebud made to the woman’s humble home. It was a little joke between them, for there was a large iron hook high up on the wall, just out of the girl’s reach, set there for the purpose of tying up a horse. The squaw took the girl’s reins from her hands, and hitched them to the hook.
“Welcome,” she said in her deep voice, and held 65 out a hand to be shaken as white folk shake hands, not in the way Indians do it.
“What is it I must say to you?” she went on, in a puzzled way. “Oh, I know. ’Much happy return.’ That is how you tell me the last time you come.”
The squaw’s great black eyes wore their wonderful soft look as they gazed down upon her visitor. It was a strange contrast they made as they stood there in the full light of the summer afternoon sun.
Both were extremely handsome of figure, though the Indian woman was more natural and several inches taller. But their faces were opposite in every detail. The squaw was dark, with clear velvety skin, and eyes black and large and deeply luminous; she had a broad, intelligent forehead over which her straight black hair fell from a natural centre parting, and was caught back from her face at about the level of her mouth with two bows of deep red braid. Her features might have been chiseled by a sculptor, they were so perfectly symmetrical, so accurately proportioned. And there were times, too, when, even to the eyes of a white man, her color rather enhanced her beauty; and this was when her slow smile crept over her face.
Rosebud had no classical regularity of feature, but she had what is better. Her face was a series of expressions, changing with almost every moment as her swift-passing moods urged her. One feature she possessed that utterly eclipsed anything the 66 stately beauty of the other could claim. She had large, lustrous violet eyes that seemed like wells of ever-changing color. They never looked at you with the same shade in their depths twice. They were eyes that madden by reason of their inconsistency. They dwarfed in beauty every other feature in the girl’s face. She was pretty in an irregular manner, but one never noticed anything in her face when her eyes were visible. These, and her masses of golden hair, which flowed loosely about her head in thick, rope-like curls, were her great claims to beauty.
Now, as she stood smiling up into the dark face above her, she looked what she was; a girl in the flush of early womanhood, a prairie girl, wild as the flowers which grow hidden in the lank grass of the plains, as wayward as the breezes which sweep them from every point of the compass.
“Mayn’t I come in?” asked Rosebud, as the woman made no move to let her pass.
Wanaha turned with some haste. “Surely,” she said. “I was thinking. What you call ‘dreaming.’”