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 . 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 XXXXX flirtation .
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