lled him, he wore Indian moccasins and deerskin breeches, though
his coat was rather like a shortened workman's blouse. He did not belong
to the life about him; he was a being apart, the spirit of vanished and
vanishing days.

"Tekewani--ah, Tekewani, you have come," the girl said, and her eyes
smiled at him as they had not smiled at Ingolby or even at the woman in
black beside her.

"How!" the chief replied, and looked at her with searching, worshipping
eyes.

"Don't look at me that way, Tekewani," she said, coming close to him. "I
had to do it, and I did it."

"The teeth of rock everywhere!" he rejoined reproachfully, with a
gesture of awe.

"I remembered all--all. You were my master, Tekewani."

"But only once with me it was, Summer Song," he persisted. Summer Song
was his name for her.

"I saw it--saw it, every foot of the way," she insisted. "I thought
hard, oh, hard as the soul thinks. And I saw it all." There was
something singularly akin in the nature of the girl and the Indian. She
spoke to him as she never spoke to any other.

"Too much seeing, it is death," he answered. "Men die with too much
seeing. I have seen them die. To look hard through deerskin curtains,
to see through the rock, to behold the water beneath the earth, and the
rocks beneath the black waters, it is for man to see if he has a soul,
but the seeing--behold, so those die who should live!"

"I live, Tekewani, though I saw the teeth of rocks beneath the black
water," she urged gently.

"Yet the half-death came--"

"I fainted, but I was not to die--it was not my time."

He shook his head gloomily. "Once it may be, but the evil spirits tempt
us to death. It matters not what comes to Tekewani; he is as the leaf
that falls from the stem; but for Summer Song that has far to go, it is
the madness from beyond the Hills of Life."

She took his hand. "I will not do it again, Tekewani."

"How!" he said, with hand upraised, as one who greets the great in this
world.

"I don't know why I did it," she added meaningly. "It was selfish. I
feel that now."

The woman in black pressed her hand timidly.

"It is so for ever with the great," Tekewani answered. "It comes, also,
from beyond the Hills--the will to do it. It is the spirit that whispers
over the earth out of the Other Earth. No one hears it but the great.
The whisper only is for this one here and that one there who is of the
Few. It whispers, and the whisper must be obeyed. So it