nosed its tracks back to where it had hopped out of the
brush, and came back and curled up at the feet of his mistress, licking
his lips and again his travel-sore paws. In a moment, feeling in his
dumb way her loneliness, perhaps, he reached up and laid his pink tongue
caressingly upon her brown hand.

Dark came softly and with it a noisy wind that whistled and murmured and
at last, growing more boisterous as the night deepened, whooped over her
bead and tossed wildly the branches of a clump of trees that grew
near. Annie-Many-Ponies listened to the wind and thought it a brother,
perhaps, of the night wind that came to the Dakota prairies and caroused
there until dawn bade it be still. Too red the blood of her people ran
in her veins for her to be afraid of the night, even though she peopled
it with dim shapes of her fancy.

After a long while the wind grew chill. Annie-Many-Ponies shivered, and
then rose and went to the horse and, reaching into the bundle which was
still bound to the saddle, she worked a plaid shawl loose from the other
things and pulled it out and wrapped it close around her and pulled it
over her head like a cowl. Then she went back and sat down against the
bowlder, waiting, with the sublime patience of her kind, for Ramon.

Until the wind hushed, listening for the dawn, she sat there and waited.
At her feet the little black dog slept with his nose folded between his
front paws over which he whimpered sometimes in his dreams. At every
little sound all through--the night Annie-Many-Ponies had listened,
thinking that at last here came Ramon to take her to the priest, but for
the first time since she had stolen out on the mesa to meet him, Ramon
did not keep the tryst--and this was to be their marriage meeting!
Annie-Many-Ponies grew very still and voiceless in her heart, as if her
very soul waited. She did not even speculate upon what the future would
be like if Ramon never came. She was waiting.

Then, just before the sky lightened, someone stepped cautiously along
a little path that led through rocks and bushes back into the hills.
Annie-Many Ponies turned her face that way and listened. But the steps
were not the steps of Ramon; Annie-Many-Ponies had too much of the
Indian keenness to be fooled by the hasty footsteps of this man. And
since it was not Ramon--her slim fingers closed upon the keen-edged
knife she carried always in its sinew-sewed buckskin sheath near her
heart.

The little black