“If Shyuote is alive he will help me.”  Zashue uttered these words timidly.

“Okoya will help me;” Hayoue spoke with great assurance.  “In that case we shall be four already.  How often have I told you, satyumishe, that Okoya is good.  He is a man; I saw it when he struck Nacaytzusle, the young Moshome.”

The elder brother said nothing.  He acknowledged the wrong he had done his eldest child.  In case Say Koitza, in case Shyuote were still alive, it would be owing to that elder son of his.  And his wife, Say Koitza, he longed for now as never before.  For her sake he had left everything,—­his home, his field.  Willingly he abandoned his whole past in order to find her.  He regretted all that he had done in that past,—­his suspicions, his neglect, his carelessness to her.  The fearful visitations of the latter days had changed him completely.

All these thoughts he gathered in one exclamation,—­

“If we only find them!”

“Let us go and search,” said Hayoue, turning to go.  His brother followed him into the woods.

Henceforth we shall have to follow the two adventurers, for a while at least.  Therefore we also must take leave of the Rito de los Frijoles.  Of its inhabitants nothing striking can hereafter be told.  They lived and died in the seclusion of their valley gorge, and neither the Tehuas nor the Navajos molested them in the years following.  Tyope continued to vegetate, anxiously taking care to give no occasion for recalling his former conduct.  The Naua soon died.  The subsequent fate of the tribe is faintly delineated by dim historical traditions, stating that they gradually emigrated from the Rito in various bands, which little by little, in course of time, built the villages inhabited by the Queres Indians of to-day.  Long before the advent of the Spaniards, in the sixteenth century of our era, the Rito was deserted and forgotten.  The big house, the houses of the Eagles and of the Corn clan, are now reduced to mere heaps of rubbish, overgrown by cactus and bunches of low grass.  Most of the cave-dwellings have crumbled also.  But the Rito always remains a beautiful spot, lovely in its solitude, picturesque and grand.  About its ruins there hovers a charm which binds man to the place where untold centuries ago man lived, loved, suffered, and died as present generations live, suffer, and die in the course of human history.

CHAPTER XX.

Sunshine and showers!  A dingy blue sky is traversed by white, fleecy clouds, long mares’ tails, on whose border giant thunderclouds loom up, sometimes drifting majestically along the horizon, or crowding upward to spread, dissolve, and disappear in the zenith.

It is the rainy season in New Mexico, with its sporadic showers, its peculiar sunlight, moments of scorching heat, and blasts of cool winds, with thunder overhead.  To the right and left rain falls in streaks, but without sultriness, and with no danger from violent wind-storms or cyclones.  We are in the beginning of the month of September.  It is warm, but not oppressive, and the spot from which we view the scenery around is high, open, and commands a wide extent of country.