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 . As for her red-headed Scotch grandfather , he had bequeathed her a somewhat whiter skin and ruddier bloom than is usually found in the breeds . Old Auguste was mightily proud of Tannis . He sent her to school for four years in Prince Albert , bound that his girl should have the best . A High School course and considerable mingling in the social life of the town -- for old Auguste was a man to be conciliated by astute politicians , since he controlled some two or three hundred half-breed votes -- sent Tannis home to the Flats with a very thin , but very deceptive , veneer of culture and civilization overlying the primitive passions and ideas of her nature . Carey saw only the beauty and the veneer . He made the mistake of thinking that Tannis was what she seemed to be -- a fairly well-educated , up-to-date young woman with whom a friendly flirtation was just what it was with white womankind -- the pleasant amusement of an hour or season . It was a mistake -- a very big mistake . Tannis understood something of piano playing , something less of grammar and Latin , and something less still of social prevarications . But she understood absolutely nothing of flirtation . You can never get an Indian to see the sense of Platonics . Carey found the Flats quite tolerable after the homecoming of Tannis . He soon fell into the habit of dropping into the Dumont house to spend the evening , talking with Tannis in the parlor -- which apartment was amazingly well done for a place like the Flats -- Tannis had not studied Prince Albert parlors four years for nothing -- or playing violin and piano duets with her . When music and conversation palled , they went for long gallops over the prairies together . Tannis rode to perfection , and managed her bad-tempered brute of a pony with a skill and grace that made Carey applaud her . She was glorious on horseback .
Sometimes he grew tired of the prairies and then he and Tannis paddled themselves over the river in Nitchie Joe 's dug-out , and landed on the old trail that struck straight XXXXX the wooded belt of the Saskatchewan valley , leading north to trading posts on the frontier of civilization .
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