When he saw Tannis Dumont
he thought he would hang on awhile longer, anyway.
Tannis was the daughter of old Auguste Dumont, who kept the one
small store at the Flats, lived in the one frame house that the
place boasted, and was reputed to be worth an amount of money
which, in half-breed eyes, was a colossal fortune. Old Auguste
was black and ugly and notoriously bad-tempered. But Tannis was
a beauty.
Tannis' great-grandmother had been a Cree squaw who married a
French trapper. The son of this union became in due time the
father of Auguste Dumont. Auguste married a woman whose mother
was a French half-breed and whose father was a pure-bred Highland
Scotchman. The result of this atrocious mixture was its
justification--Tannis of the Flats--who looked as if all the
blood of all the Howards might be running in her veins.
But, after all, the dominant current in those same veins was from
the race of plain and prairie. The practiced eye detected it in
the slender stateliness of carriage, in the graceful, yet
voluptuous, curves of the lithe body, in the smallness and
delicacy of hand and foot, in the purple sheen on
straight-falling masses of blue-black hair, and, more than all
else, in the long, dark eye, full and soft, yet alight with a
slumbering fire. France, too, was responsible for somewhat in
Tannis. It gave her a light step in place of the stealthy
half-breed shuffle, it arched her red upper lip into a more
tremulous bow, it lent a note of laughter to her voice and a
sprightlier wit to her tongue.
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