n
to any one for a guide and say he was perfectly trustworthy. He hadn't
done anything very dreadful yet, but she felt he was going to.

He had a number of angry confabs with his wife that morning. At least,
he did the confabbing and the squaw protested. Margaret gathered after a
while that it was something about herself. The furtive, frightened
glances that the squaw cast in her direction sometimes, when the man was
not looking, made her think so. She tried to say it was all imagination,
and that her nerves were getting the upper hand of her, but in spite of
her she shuddered sometimes, just as she had done when Rosa looked at
her. She decided that she must be going to have a fit of sickness, and
that just as soon as she got in the neighborhood of Mrs. Tanner's again
she would pack her trunk and go home to her mother. If she was going to
be sick she wanted her mother.

About noon things came to a climax. They halted on the top of the mesa,
and the Indians had another altercation, which ended in the man
descending the trail a fearfully steep way, down four hundred feet to
the trading-post in the canon. Margaret looked down and gasped and
thanked a kind Providence that had not made it necessary for her to make
that descent; but the squaw stood at the top with her baby and looked
down in silent sorrow--agony perhaps would be a better name. Her face
was terrible to look upon.

Margaret could not understand it, and she went to the woman and put her
hand out sympathetically, asking, gently: "What is the matter, you poor
little thing? Oh, what is it?"

Perhaps the woman understood the tenderness in the tone, for she
suddenly turned and rested her forehead against Margaret's shoulder,
giving one great, gasping sob, then lifted her dry, miserable eyes to
the girl's face as if to thank her for her kindness.

Margaret's heart was touched. She threw her arms around the poor woman
and drew her, papoose and all, comfortingly toward her, patting her
shoulder and saying gentle, soothing words as she would to a little
child. And by and by the woman lifted her head again, the tears coursing
down her face, and tried to explain, muttering her queer gutturals and
making eloquent gestures until Margaret felt she understood. She
gathered that the man had gone down to the trading-post to find the
"Aneshodi," and that the squaw feared that he would somehow procure
firewater either from the trader or from some Indian he might meet, and
wo