When it was loosened and hung in tangled masses nearly to Rhoda’s knees, Marie’s delight in its loveliness knew no expression.  She fetched a queer battered old comb which she washed and then proceeded with true feminine rapture to comb the wonderful waving locks.  In the midst of this Kut-le entered.  He gazed on Rhoda’s new disguise with delight.  Indeed her delicate face, above the many-hued garment, was like a harebell growing in a gaudy nasturtium bed.

“We can only let you on the roof,” said Kut-le, who was carrying Rhoda’s sombrero.

Rhoda made no reply but when Marie had plaited her hair in a rippling braid she followed Kut-le up the short ladder.  Her sense of cleanliness after the weeks of disorder was delightful.  As she stepped on the flat-topped roof and the sweet clear air filled her lungs she felt as if reborn.  With Navajo blankets, Kut-le had contrived an awning that not only made a bit of shade but precluded view from below.  The rich tints of the blankets were startlingly picturesque against the yellow gray of the adobe.  Rhoda, dropped luxuriantly to the heap of blankets and turned her face toward the mountain, many-colored and bare toward the base, deep-cloaked with pinon, oak and Juniper on the uplands.  From its base flowed the little river, gurgling over its shallow bed of stone and rich with green along its flat banks.  Close beside the river was the Pueblo village, the many-terraced buildings, on one of the roofs of which Rhoda sat.

Kut-le, stretched on the roof near by, smoked cigarette after cigarette as he watched the girl’s quiet face, but he did not speak.  For three or four hours the two sat thus in silence.  Just as the sun sank behind the mountain, a bell clanged and then fell to tolling softly.  Then Kut-le broke his silence.

“That’s the bell of the old mission.  Some one has been buried, I guess.  We can look.  There are no tourists now.”

There was a sound of wailing:  a deep mournful sound that caught Rhoda’s heart to her throat and blanched her face.  It was the sound of the grief of primitive man, the cry of the forlorn and broken-hearted, uncloaked by convention.  It touched a primitive chord of response in Rhoda that set her to trembling.  Surely, when the world was young she too had wept so.  Surely she too had voiced a poignant, unbearable loss in just such a wild outpouring of grief!

They moved to the edge of the terrace and looked below into the street.  Down the rocky way a line of Indians was bearing hand-mills and jars and armloads of ornaments.

“They will take those to the ‘killing place’ and break them that the dead owner may have them afterward,” explained Kut-le softly.  “It always makes me think of a verse in the Bible.  I can’t recall the words exactly though.”

Rhoda glanced up into the dark face with a look of appreciation.

“‘And the grinders shall cease because they are few!’” she said, “’and those that look out of the windows be darkened.  And the doors shall be shut in the street when the sound of the grinding is low, because man goeth to his long home and mourners go about the street.’”