“Gail,” he said, “Aunty Boone is right.  This is her Africa.  I don’t believe she will ever leave it.”

“She can’t stay here, Jondo,” I replied.

“She will, though.  You will see.  Did she ever fail to have her way?”

“No.  She is a type of her own, never to be reproduced, but like a great dog in her faithful loyalty,” I declared.

“And shrewder than most men,” Jondo went on.  “She supplied the lost link with Santan for me last night.  Years ago, when Little Blue Flower brought me a message from Father Josef on the morning that we took Eloise from Santa Fe, I caught a glimpse of the Apache across the plaza and read the message—­’trust the bearer anywhere’—­to mean that boy.  Aunty Boone had just peered out and scared the little girl away.  She told me all about it last night, when she was bewailing Beverly’s hard fate.  How small a thing can open the road to a big tragedy.  I trusted that whelp till that day at San Christobal.”

“I hope we will finish this soon,” I said.  “I don’t understand Beverly at all and I marvel at Little Blue Flower’s love for him.  Don’t you?”

Jondo looked up with a pathos in his dark-blue eyes.

“Don’t hurry, Gail.  The trails all end somewhere soon.  Life is a stranger thing from day to day, but the one thing that no man will ever fully understand is a woman’s love for man.  There is only one thing higher, and that is mother-love.”

“The kind that you and Uncle Esmond have,” I said.

“Oh, I am only a man, but Clarenden has a woman’s heart, as you and Beverly and my sister’s child all know.”

“Your sister’s child?” I gasped.

“Yes.  When her parents went with yellow fever, too, I could not adopt Mat—­you know why.  Clarenden did it for me.  She has always known that I am her uncle, but Mat was always a self-contained child.”

I loved Mat more than ever from that hour.

The next day our trail ran into pine forests, where tall, shapely trees point skyward.  Not a dense woodland, but a seemingly endless one.  Snows lay in the darker places, and here and there streams trickled out into the sunlight, whose only sources were these melting snows.  It was a land of silence and loneliness—­a land forgotten or unknown to record.  The Hopi trail was stronger here and we followed it eagerly, but night overtook us early in the forest.

That evening we gathered about a huge fire of pine boughs beneath a low stone ridge covered with evergreen trees that sheltered us warmly from the sharp west winds.  We heard the cries of night-roving beasts, and in the darkness, now and then, a pair of gleaming eyes, seen for an instant, and then the rush of feet, told us that some wild creature had looked for the first time on fire.

“To-morrow night will see our journey’s end,” Jondo declared.  “The Hopi can’t be far away, and I’m sure they are safe yet, and we shall reach them before the Apache does.”