...without the word actually being said. After all this is 1959. A man comes to town and says a camp of men have an Indian woman as a slave and are beating her and working her to death. Matt rides out and rescues the woman, at the same time finding out that she is actually white, captured by the Indians ten years before. There was only one reason the Indians captured white women, and it wasn't to teach them English. The woman insists she bring along a child that is with her, a girl named Fawn that she says she has cared for since her Indian mother died. Matt takes them both to Dodge.
When he tries to get a room for them at the Dodge House, the innkeeper refuses to take the girl because she is Indian. The fact is though, she is half Indian. She is the white woman's - Mrs. Phillips' - daughter by an Indian chief. Of course Matt, Kitty, Doc, and Chester are sympathetic, even oddly so considering how such things were perceived in general by those in the old West. But, hey, they are the good guys, after all.
Mrs. Phillips has contacted her husband in Boston to let him know she is alive, and he is on his way to Dodge. What will he do when he gets there? Watch and find out.
This subject involves the theme of rape, biracial children, how some mothers are just as bonded to their children by rape as they would be bound to children of consensual relationships, and the reaction of society to people who are in the end just victims. It was a very well done and interesting episode and I'd recommend it.