e hut in the
direction of the lake. Very soon she came back weeping, and sobbed out:

'I met some one in the village who lives in my country, and he told me
that my mother is very, very ill, and if I do not go to her at once she
will be dead before I arrive. I will return as soon as I can, and now
farewell.' And she set forth in the direction of the mountains. But this
story was not true; she knew nothing about her mother, only she wanted
an excuse to go home and tell her family that their prophecies had come
true, and that the buffalo was dead.

Balancing her basket on her head, she walked along, and directly she
had left the village behind her she broke out into the song of the Rover
of the Plain, and at last, at the end of the day, she came to the group
of huts where her parents lived. Her friends all ran to meet her, and,
weeping, she told them that the buffalo was dead.

This sad news spread like lightning through the country, and the people
flocked from far and near to bewail the loss of the beast who had been
their pride.

'If you had only listened to us,' they cried, 'he would be alive now.
But you refused all the little girls we offered you, and would have
nothing but the buffalo. And remember what the medicine-man said: "If
the buffalo dies you die also!"'

So they bewailed their fate, one to the other, and for a while they did
not perceive that the girl's husband was sitting in their midst, leaning
his gun against a tree. Then one man, turning, beheld him, and bowed
mockingly.

'Hail, murderer! hail! you have slain us all!'

The young man stared, not knowing what he meant, and answered,
wonderingly:

'I shot a buffalo; is that why you call me a murderer?'

'A buffalo--yes; but the servant of your wife! It was he who carried the
wood and drew the water. Did you not know it?'

'No; I did not know it,' replied the husband in surprise. 'Why did no
one tell me? Of course I should not have shot him!'

'Well, he is dead,' answered they, 'and we must die too.'

At this the girl took a cup in which some poisonous herbs had been
crushed, and holding it in her hands, she wailed: 'O my father, Rover of
the Plain!' Then drinking a deep draught from it, fell back dead. One
by one her parents, her brothers and her sisters, drank also and died,
singing a dirge to the memory of the buffalo.

The girl's husband looked on with horror; and returned sadly home across
the mountains, and, entering his hut, threw hi