dued voices sounded from
the apartment, monotonous recitals, which the loud refrain, "Heiti-na,
Heiti-na," at times interrupted. The poor deaf widow sat with tearful
eyes in a corner; her lips moved, but no sound came from them; only,
when the leader of the choir broke out with appropriate gesticulations,
she chimed in loudly. When at such a signal the other women present
began to tear their hair, she did the same, and shouted at the top of
her voice like the others, "Heiti-na, Heiti-na!"

Group after group of mourners visited the room, until both clans, Tanyi
and Tyame, had performed their duty. Hannay, too, had made her
appearance; she had shed tears like a rain-cloud, had howled and whined
more than any one else. Her grief was surely assumed, for when Tyope
asked her in the evening she told him everything in detail that she had
noticed,--how this one had looked, how such and such a one had
yelled,--plainly showing that the flood of tears had in no manner
impeded her faculties of perception, the sighs and sobs around her in no
manner deafened her attentive ear. Tyope listened with apparent
indifference, and said nothing. She attended to the weeping part, he not
so much to the duty of pious recollection as to that of deep thinking
over the new phase which matters had entered upon in consequence of the
bloody event.

For this sudden death of the maseua was for his designs a most fortunate
occurrence. The only man who in the prospective strife between the clans
might have taken an attitude dangerous, perhaps disastrous, to his
purposes, was now dead; and the office which that man held had become
vacant. There was but one individual left in the tribe who might yet
prove a stumbling-block to him; that was the Hishtanyi Chayan. But the
great medicine-man was not so much a man of action as a man of words,
and the force of his oracular utterances Tyope hoped to destroy through
the powerful speeches of the Koshare Naua and the strong medicine of the
Shkuy Chayan. The plans of Tyope had been immensely furthered by the
terrible accident; they had advanced so much that he felt it
indispensable to modify them to some extent. Terror and dismay were
great at the Rito, and the council had been adjourned _sine die_. There
could be no thought of a fresh accusation against Shotaye until the four
days of official mourning were past, and the campaign against the enemy,
which the bloody outrage imperatively called for.

The murder by th