“Well, I’ve got to hand it to you, boys,” Luck praised them with a smile.  “You sat tight, and when I said ‘Hold,’ you sure held the pose.  You dissolved perfectly—­you’ll see.”

“Aw, gwan!” contradicted Happy Jack with his mouth full.  “I never dissolved; I plumb melted!”

“If you boys could just see how beautiful you looked,” Rosemary reproved, starting on her second round with the coffee boiler.  “I saw it from behind the camera, and Luck had you sitting so the light was shining on your faces; honestly, you looked beautiful!”

“Aw, gwan!” gurgled Happy Jack, reddening uncomfortably.

“It’s late,” Luck broke in, emptying his cup the second time.  “But I’m going to make that firelight scene of you, Annie.  The wind happens to be just right for the flame effect I want.  Did you make up, as I told you?”

For answer, Annie-Many-Ponies threw back her shrouding red shawl and stepped proudly out before him in the firelight.  Her brown arms were bare and banded with bracelets of some dull metal.  Her fringed dress of deerskin was heavily embroidered with stained porcupine quills.  Her slim feet were clothed in beaded moccasins.  It was the gala dress of the daughter of a chief, and as the daughter of a chief she stood straight and slender and haughty before him.  The Happy Family stared at her, astonished.  They had not even known that she possessed such a costume.

Ordinarily the Happy Family would have taken immediate advantage of their freedom and would have gone to bed and to the sleep for which their tired bodies hungered the more as the food and hot coffee filled them with a sense of well-being.  But not even Rosemary wanted to go and miss any of that wonderful scene where Annie-Many-Ponies, young savage that she was, stood in the light of her flaming camp fire and prayed to her gods before she went to meet her lover.  She rehearsed it once before Luck lighted the radium flares.  Then, in the searing heat of that white-hot flame, which will melt rock as a candle melts, Annie-Many-Ponies crossed herself, and then lifted her young face and bare arms to the heavens and prayed as the priest in the mission school had taught her,—­a real prayer in her own Indian tongue, while Luck turned the crank and gloated professionally in her beauty.

The Happy Family, watching her, remembered that it was Christmas morning; remembered oddly, in the midst of their work, the old, old story of the three Wise Men and the Star, and of the Wonder-Child in the manger.  Something there was in the voice and the face of Annie-Many-Ponies that suggested it.  Something there was of adoration in her upturned glance, as if she too were looking for the Star.

They did not talk much after that, and when they did, their voices were lower than usual.  They banked the fire with sand, and Bill Holmes shouldered the camera with its precious store of scenes.  As they trooped silently down to the house and to their beds, they felt something of the magnitude of life, something of the mystery.  Behind them, treading noiselessly in her beaded deerskin moccasins, Annie-Many-Ponies followed like a houseless wraith of the plains, the little black dog at her heels.