“The Navajo has one mother—­the earth.  Her body has gone to the earth and it will become dust.  But her spirit is in the air.  It shall whisper to me from the wind.  I shall hear it on running waters.  It will hide in the morning music of a mocking-bird and in the lonely night cry of the canyon hawk.  Her blood will go to make the red of the Indian flowers and her soul will rest at midnight in the lily that opens only to the moon.  She will wait in the shadow for me, and live in the great mountain that is my home, and for ever step behind me on the trail.”

“You will kill Willetts?” demanded Shefford.

“The Navajo will not seek the missionary.”

“But if you meet him you’ll kill him?”

“Bi Nai, would Nas Ta Bega kill after it is too late?  What good could come?  The Navajo is above revenge.”

“If he crosses my trail I think I couldn’t help but kill him,” muttered Shefford in a passion that wrung the threat from him.

The Indian put his arm round the white man’s shoulders.

“Bi Nai, long ago I made you my brother.  And now you make me your brother.  Is it not so?  Glen Naspa’s spirit calls for wisdom, not revenge.  Willetts must be a bad man.  But we’ll let him live.  Life will punish him.  Who knows if he was all to blame?  Glen Naspa was only one pretty Indian girl.  There are many white men in the desert.  She loved a white man when she was a baby.  The thing was a curse. . . .  Listen, Bi Nai, and the Navajo will talk.

“Many years ago the Spanish padres, the first white men, came into the land of the Indian.  Their search was for gold.  But they were not wicked men.  They did not steal and kill.  They taught the Indian many useful things.  They brought him horses.  But when they went away they left him unsatisfied with his life and his god.

“Then came the pioneers.  They crossed the great river and took the pasture-lands and the hunting-grounds of the Indian.  They drove him backward, and the Indian grew sullen.  He began to fight.  The white man’s government made treaties with the Indian, and these were broken.  Then war came—­fierce and bloody war.  The Indian was driven to the waste places.  The stream of pioneers, like a march of ants, spread on into the desert.  Every valley where grass grew, every river, became a place for farms and towns.  Cattle choked the water-holes where the buffalo and deer had once gone to drink.  The forests in the hills were cut and the springs dried up.  And the pioneers followed to the edge of the desert.

“Then came the prospectors, mad, like the padres for the gleam of gold.  The day was not long enough for them to dig in the creeks and the canyon; they worked in the night.  And they brought weapons and rum to the Indian, to buy from him the secret of the places where the shining gold lay hidden.

“Then came the traders.  And they traded with the Indian.  They gave him little for much, and that little changed his life.  He learned a taste for the sweet foods of the white man.  Because he could trade for a sack of flour he worked less in the field.  And the very fiber of his bones softened.