She was dead, and she was the last of Nas Ta Bega’s family.  In the old grandfather’s agony, in the wild chant of the stricken grandmother, in the brother’s stern and terrible calmness Shefford felt more than the death of a loved one.  The shadow of ruin, of doom, of death hovered over the girl and her family and her tribe and her race.  There was no consolation to offer these relatives of Glen Naspa.  Shefford took one more fascinated gaze at her dark, eloquent, prophetic face, at the tragic tiny shape by her side, and then with bowed head he left the hogan.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Outside he paced to and fro, with an aching heart for Nas Ta Bega, with something of the white man’s burden of crime toward the Indian weighing upon his soul.

Old Hosteen Doetin came to him with shaking hands and words memorable of the time Glen Naspa left his hogan.

“Me no savvy Jesus Christ.  Me hungry.  Me no eat Jesus Christ!”

That seemed to be all of his trouble that he could express to Shefford.  He could not understand the religion of the missionary, this Jesus Christ who had called his granddaughter away.  And the great fear of an old Indian was not death, but hunger.  Shefford remembered a custom of the Navajos, a thing barbarous looked at with a white man’s mind.  If an old Indian failed on a long march he was inclosed by a wall of stones, given plenty to eat and drink, and left there to die in the desert.  Not death did he fear, but hunger!  Old Hosteen Doetin expected to starve, now that the young and strong squaw of his family was gone.

Shefford spoke in his halting Navajo and assured the old Indian that Nas Ta Bega would never let him starve.

At sunset Shefford stood with Nas Ta Bega facing the west.  The Indian was magnificent in repose.  He watched the sun go down upon the day that had seen the burial of the last of his family.  He resembled an impassive destiny, upon which no shocks fell.  He had the light of that flaring golden sky in his face, the majesty of the mountain in his mien, the silence of the great gulf below on his lips.  This educated Navajo, who had reverted to the life of his ancestors, found in the wildness and loneliness of his environment a strength no white teaching could ever have given him.  Shefford sensed in him a measureless grief, an impenetrable gloom, a tragic acceptance of the meaning of Glen Naspa’s ruin and death—­the vanishing of his race from the earth.  Death had written the law of such bitter truth round Glen Naspa’s lips, and the same truth was here in the grandeur and gloom of the Navajo.

“Bi Nai,” he said, with the beautiful sonorous roll in his voice, “Glen Naspa is in her grave and there are no paths to the place of her sleep.  Glen Naspa is gone.”

“Gone!  Where?  Nas Ta Bega, remember I lost my own faith, and I have not yet learned yours.”