“Nas Ta Bega, were you looking for me?” he asked.

“You had no gun,” replied the Indian.

But for his very low voice, his slow speaking of the words, Shefford would have thought him a white man.  For Shefford there was indeed an instinct in this meeting, and he turned to face the Navajo.

“Withers told me you had been educated, that you came back to the desert, that you never showed your training. . . .  Nas Ta Bega, did you understand all I told Withers?”

“Yes,” replied the Indian.

“You won’t betray me?”

“I am a Navajo.”

“Nas Ta Bega, you trail me—­you say I had no gun.”  Shefford wanted to ask this Indian if he cared to be the white man’s friend, but the question was not easy to put, and, besides, seemed unnecessary.  “I am alone and strange in this wild country.  I must learn.”

“Nas Ta Bega will show you the trails and the water-holes and how to hide from Shadd.”

“For money—­for silver you will do this?” inquired Shefford.

Shefford felt that the Indian’s silence was a rebuke.  He remembered Withers’s singular praise of this red man.  He realized he must change his idea of Indians.

“Nas Ta Bega, I know nothing.  I feel like a child in the wilderness.  When I speak it is out of the mouths of those who have taught me.  I must find a new voice and a new life. . . .  You heard my story to Withers.  I am an outcast from my own people.  If you will be my friend—­be so.”

The Indian clasped Shefford’s hand and held it in a response that was more beautiful for its silence.  So they stood for a moment in the starlight.

“Nas Ta Bega, what did Withers mean when he said go to the Navajo for a faith?” asked Shefford.

“He meant the desert is my mother. . . .  Will you go with Nas Ta Bega into the canyon and the mountains?”

“Indeed I will.”

They unclasped hands and turned toward the trading-post.

“Nas Ta Bega, have you spoken my tongue to any other white man since you returned to your home?” asked Shefford.

“No.”

“Why do you—­why are you different for me?”

The Indian maintained silence.

“Is it because of—­of Glen Naspa?” inquired Shefford.

Nas Ta Bega stalked on, still silent, but Shefford divined that, although his service to Glen Naspa would never be forgotten, still it was not wholly responsible for the Indian’s subtle sympathy.

“Bi Nai!  The Navajo will call his white friend Bi Nai—­brother,” said Nas Ta Bega, and he spoke haltingly, not as if words were hard to find, but strange to speak.  “I was stolen from my mother’s hogan and taken to California.  They kept me ten years in a mission at San Bernardino and four years in a school.  They said my color and my hair were all that was left of the Indian in me.  But they could not see my heart.  They took fourteen years of my life.  They wanted to make me a missionary among my own people.  But the white man’s ways and his life and his God are not the Indian’s.  They never can be.”