In the early days of the frontier, when the Indians were less acquainted with the ways and customs of the whites, who had not yet encroached so far upon their territory, an attack was made by a band of marauding Sioux upon an emigrant train, and only a little yellow-haired baby escaped the knife and tomahawk. As the years went by and she grew to womanhood, the tribe gradually invested her with supernatural powers, feeling more and more her sense of strangeness, difference, and isolation. She knew nothing of her origin, spoke only the guttural tongue of her captors, and yet was withheld from intimate intercourse with them by the difference in their type. Her influence over the Indians was paramount, and they obeyed her in all things, holding her sacred and apart from them, attended by an Indian maid constantly. One day as she wandered among the hills, she saw a man who at once appealed to her in a strange way as her mate. He, too, was fair and blue-eyed, and she saw in him the partner of her life, as he looked wonderingly at her beauty. She led him to her tribe, who at once bound him to the stake and would have put him to the torture had not her threats to blast them with misfortunes stayed their hands, and finally her arguments that he was her natural mate just as the handsome young Indian, the lover of her maid, was mated in all ways to her, proved effective, and she was allowed to go with the trapper to his and her own people.