ght cry of the
canyon hawk. Her blood will go to make the red of the Indian flowers and
her soul will rest at midnight in the lily that opens only to the moon.
She will wait in the shadow for me, and live in the great mountain that
is my home, and for ever step behind me on the trail."

"You will kill Willetts?" demanded Shefford.

"The Navajo will not seek the missionary."

"But if you meet him you'll kill him?"

"Bi Nai, would Nas Ta Bega kill after it is too late? What good could
come? The Navajo is above revenge."

"If he crosses my trail I think I couldn't help but kill him," muttered
Shefford in a passion that wrung the threat from him.

The Indian put his arm round the white man's shoulders.

"Bi Nai, long ago I made you my brother. And now you make me your
brother. Is it not so? Glen Naspa's spirit calls for wisdom, not
revenge. Willetts must be a bad man. But we'll let him live. Life will
punish him. Who knows if he was all to blame? Glen Naspa was only one
pretty Indian girl. There are many white men in the desert. She loved
a white man when she was a baby. The thing was a curse. ... Listen, Bi
Nai, and the Navajo will talk.

"Many years ago the Spanish padres, the first white men, came into the
land of the Indian. Their search was for gold. But they were not wicked
men. They did not steal and kill. They taught the Indian many useful
things. They brought him horses. But when they went away they left him
unsatisfied with his life and his god.

"Then came the pioneers. They crossed the great river and took the
pasture-lands and the hunting-grounds of the Indian. They drove him
backward, and the Indian grew sullen. He began to fight. The white man's
government made treaties with the Indian, and these were broken. Then
war came--fierce and bloody war. The Indian was driven to the waste
places. The stream of pioneers, like a march of ants, spread on into the
desert. Every valley where grass grew, every river, became a place for
farms and towns. Cattle choked the water-holes where the buffalo and
deer had once gone to drink. The forests in the hills were cut and the
springs dried up. And the pioneers followed to the edge of the desert.

"Then came the prospectors, mad, like the padres for the gleam of
gold. The day was not long enough for them to dig in the creeks and the
canyon; they worked in the night. And they brought weapons and rum to
the Indian, to buy from him the secret of the places where the sh