Carey slept in a loft over the office , and got his meals as Joe Esquint 's , across the `` street . '' Joe Esquint 's wife was a good cook , as cooks go among the breeds , and Carey soon became a great pet of hers . Carey had a habit of becoming a pet with women . He had the `` way '' that has to be born in a man and can never be acquired . Besides , he was as handsome as clean-cut features , deep-set , dark-blue eyes , fair curls and six feet of muscle could make him . Mrs. Joe Esquint thought that his mustache was the most wonderfully beautiful thing , in its line , that she had ever seen . Fortunately , Mrs. Joe was so old and fat and ugly that even the malicious and inveterate gossip of skulking breeds and Indians , squatting over teepee fires , could not hint at anything questionable in the relations between her and Carey . But it was a different matter with Tannis Dumont . Tannis came home from the academy at Prince Albert early in July , when Carey had been at the Flats a month and had exhausted all the few novelties of his position . Paul Dumont had already become so expert at the code that his mistakes no longer afforded Carey any fun , and the latter was getting desperate . He had serious intentions of throwing up the business altogether , and betaking himself to an Alberta ranch , where at least one would have the excitement of roping horses . 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 XXXXX blue-black hair , and , more than all else , in the long , dark eye , full and soft , yet alight with a slumbering fire .
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