"You love as the wind, eh? Too many."
"I'm frightfully nice when I'm kissed."
"Maybe so. Now you catchum horse."
My horse? I had no horse.
"You poor?" she asked.
"I'm all I've got," I told her.
"S'pose," said Rain gaily, "I make 'um Indian man?"
"What! You'll make me an Indian? Oh, what a lark! Come on!"
She led me through an aspen grove, all tremulous green and silver, and in her little teepee, Rich Mixed and I had breakfast. Then she left us to watch a copper pot of herbs which simmered on the fire, and slid away to her father's burial scaffold. There, with some quaint apology to the Sun God, she took back her braids of hair and sacrificed instead the tip of her left little finger. When she returned to the teepee, she showed me her bandaged hand, and said she had cut her finger, but at the time I felt more interested in my cigarette, the last. Then, while I sat with a shaving mirror before me, she wove her braids of hair into my black thatch, so that the long plaits came down in front of my shoulders almost to the waist. I was delighted, especially when she set at the back of my head one straight-up eagle plume.
My dress suit, which last night had astonished Winnipeg, seemed no longer congruous. Rain bade me take it off, showing me the juice from her pot of herbs, also a breech clout, at which I shied a little. Still it was not long before I stripped, to play at red Indians with the brown juice and the clout, until Rain came back to see. She opened a trunk of parfleche (arrow-proof hide) to show me her father's clothes, then squatting by the fire she burned sweet grass for incense to cleanse us both.