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Updated: June 16, 2025
She tried not to let him go out of her sight, and when she followed him into the huge cache and saw him twirling and tossing great bales around as though they were feather pillows, she felt strengthened in her disobedience to her father. This sight and the picture in her mind's eye of the bare lodge of Snettishane, put all doubts at rest.
As the sun sank lower and lower toward the north and midnight approached, the Factor began making unmistakable preparations for departure. As he turned to stride away Lit-lit's heart sank; but it rose again as he halted, half turning on one heel. "Oh, by the way, Snettishane," he said, "I want a squaw to wash for me and mend my clothes."
When they strolled back again an hour later, Fox and Snettishane had attained to a ceremonious discussion of the condition and quality of the gunpowder and bacon which the Company was offering in trade. Meanwhile Lit-lit, divining the Factor's errand, had crept in under the rear wall of the lodge, and through the front flap was peeping out at the two logomachists by the mosquito smudge.
Snettishane grunted and suggested Wanidani, who was an old woman and toothless. "No, no," interposed the Factor. "What I want is a wife. I've been kind of thinking about it, and the thought just struck me that you might know of some one that would suit."
Then he said aloud, "Damn that raven," and Lit-lit laughed quietly under the blankets. In the morning, bright and early, Snettishane put in an ominous appearance and was set to breakfast in the kitchen with Wanidani. He refused "squaw food," and a little later bearded his son-in-law in the store where the trading was done.
Snettishane was inwardly pleased, though his sphinx-like visage never relaxed. He was drawing the Factor, and making him break ground. Being a creature so elemental as to have room for but one idea at a time, Snettishane could pursue that one idea a greater distance than could John Fox.
The Factor's reply was short and to the point; for he directed his father-in-law to go to the heavenly antipodes, and by the scruff of the neck and the slack of the blanket propelled him on that trail as far as the door. But Snettishane sneaked around and in by the kitchen, cornering Lit-lit in the great living-room of the Fort.
He knew how a shotgun scattered at fifty yards, and he knew that he had peppered Snettishane across the shoulders and in the small of the back. And Snettishane knew that he knew, but neither referred to it "What dost thou here?" the Factor demanded. "It were time old bones should be in bed." But Snettishane was stately in spite of the bird-shot burning under his skin.
And thereat, out of her great happiness and out of the fear that it might be taken from her, she launched into an original and glowing address upon the status and rights of woman the first new-woman lecture delivered north of Fifty-three. But it fell on unheeding ears. Snettishane was still in the dark ages.
Again he gave it up and started to return to the Fort. Snettishane watched him go, making no effort to stop him, but seeing him, in the end, stop himself. "Come to think of it," the Factor remarked, "we both of us forgot Lit-lit. Now I wonder if she'll suit me?" Snettishane met the suggestion with a mirthless face, behind the mask of which his soul grinned wide. It was a distinct victory.
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