know one thing--if they
keep that up much longer, I'll either get out there with a gun, or
saddle up and follow the boys."

"They'd tease us to death, Jean, if we let Annie run us out."

"It's run or be run," Jean retorted irritatedly. "I wanted to write
poetry today--I thought of an awfully striking sentence about the--for
heaven's sake, where's a shotgun?"

"Jean, you wouldn't!" Rosemary, I may here explain, was very femininely
afraid of guns. "She'd--why, there's no telling WHAT she might do! Luck
says she carries a knife."

"What if she does? She ought to carry a few bird-shot, too. She's got
nothing to mourn about--nobody's died, has there?

"Hiu-hiu-hia-a-a,ah! Hia-a-a-a-ah!" wailed Annie-Many-Ponies in her
tent, because she would never again look upon the face of Wagalexa
Conka--or if she did it would be to see his anger blaze and burn her
heart to ashes. To her it was as though death sat beside her; the death
of Wagalexa Conka's friendship for her. She forgot his harshness because
he thought her disobedient and wicked. She forgot that she loved Ramon
Chavez, and that he was rich and would give her a fine home and much
love. She forgot everything but that she had sworn an oath and that she
must keep it though it killed faith and kindness and friendship as with
a knife.

So she wailed, in high-keyed, minor chanting unearthly in its primitive
inarticulateness of sorrow, the chant of the Omaha mourning song. So
had her tribe wailed in the olden days when warriors returned to the
villages and told of their dead. So had her mother wailed when the Great
Spirit took away her first man-child. So had the squaws wailed in their
tepees since the land was young. And the little black dog, sitting on
his haunches before her door, pointed his moist nose into the sunlight
and howled in mournful sympathy.

"Oh, my gracious!" Jean, usually so calm, flung a magazine against the
wall. "This is just about as pleasant as a hanging! let's saddle up and
ride in after the mail, Rosemary. Maybe the squaw in her will be howled
out by the time we get back." And she added with a venomous sincerity
that would have warmed the heart of old Applehead, "I'd shoot that dog,
for half a cent! How do you suppose an animal of his size can produce
all that noise?"

"Oh, I don't know!" Rosemary spoke with the patience of utter weariness.
"I've stood her and the dog for about eight months and I'm getting kind
of hardened to it. But I never did