dismount and take
a look at that downward-sweeping world of color, of wide space, at the
wild desert upland which from there unrolled its magnificent panorama.

Then he passed on into the cedars. How strange to hear the lambs
bleating again! Lambing-time had come early, but still spring was there
in the new green of grass, in the bright upland flower. He led his
mustang out of the cedars into the cleared circle. It was full of colts
and lambs, and there were the shepherd-dogs and a few old rams and ewes.
But the circle was a quiet place this day. There were no Indians in
sight. Shefford loosened the saddle-girths on Nack-yal and, leaving him
to graze, went toward the hogan of Hosteen Doetin. A blanket was hung
across the door. Shefford heard a low chanting. He waited beside the
door till the covering was pulled in, then he entered.

Hosteen Doetin met him, clasped his hand. The old Navajo could not
speak; his fine face was working in grief; tears streamed from his
dim old eyes and rolled down his wrinkled cheeks. His sorrow was no
different from a white man's sorrow. Beyond him Shefford saw Nas Ta Bega
standing with folded arms, somehow terrible in his somber impassiveness.
At his feet crouched the old woman, Hosteen Doetin's wife, and beside
her, prone and quiet, half covered with a blanket, lay Glen Naspa.

She was dead. To Shefford she seemed older than when he had last seen
her. And she was beautiful. Calm, cold, dark, with only bitter lips to
give the lie to peace! There was a story in those lips.

At her side, half hidden under the fold of blanket, lay a tiny bundle.
Its human shape startled Shefford. Then he did not need to be told
the tragedy. When he looked again at Glen Naspa's face he seemed to
understand all that had made her older, to feel the pain that had lined
and set her lips.

She was dead, and she was the last of Nas Ta Bega's family. In the old
grandfather's agony, in the wild chant of the stricken grandmother, in
the brother's stern and terrible calmness Shefford felt more than the
death of a loved one. The shadow of ruin, of doom, of death hovered
over the girl and her family and her tribe and her race. There was no
consolation to offer these relatives of Glen Naspa. Shefford took one
more fascinated gaze at her dark, eloquent, prophetic face, at the
tragic tiny shape by her side, and then with bowed head he left the
hogan.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Outside he paced to and fro, with an achin