A week of this, and we lost our sense of direction, for we had difficulty in estimating the sun's course. We did not know where we were or how we were heading. Two or three times we had emerged temporarily from the gloomy light of ravines into wide, rocky valleys, scattered with square, table-like rock-masses, rising abruptly from the valley-floor. But invariably the squat bow-men, no matter how deadly our fire, would swarm over the valley behind us and on both flanks and herd us into another ravine.
Two things we were thankful for. We had enough water, and they never attacked at night. So confident did we become on this last score that we abandoned attempts to watch, and slept, all three of us, from dusk to daylight, for we were always dog-tired.
But now we reached a ravine which was waterless. One of our water-skins was punctured by an arrow and useless. The other was rapidly diminishing in contents. Our jerked meat was running out. Thirst and hunger confronted us. We were in desperate plight, and our relentless pursuers knew it. They crept closer and closer. We must move as carefully as they if we were to escape an arrow in the chest.
A charge, attended by a waste of powder and lead, drove them back temporarily, but they had caught up with us again when we sighted an elbow turn in the ravine ahead of us. They seemed to be oddly excited. We could hear their guttural calls from cliff to cliff, could see them running between the bowlders and along the cliff-ledges. They came after us with increasing confidence, and we dodged under their arrows and raced around the elbow of the cliff.
Tawannears was leading us, and he froze stiff at the first glimpse of the valley below. But it was not at the valley he was looking. I saw that at once. His eyes were glued on the figure of the shepherd maid, who stood lithely in front of her feathered flock, bow raised and arrow on string, challenging our approach.
CHAPTER XV
KACHINA
She was a lissom creature, with a ruddy skin and blue-black hair as fine-spun as silk—not coarse as is most Indians'—bound with a fillet of serpent's-skin. Her dress was a robe of white cotton, edged with vivid crimson, that was looped over her right shoulder, passed under her left arm and belted about her waist with another band of serpent's-skin. It stopped short of her bare knees. On her feet were sandals, cleverly made of some vegetable fiber. And all around her strutted and cackled and gobbled hundreds of turkeys, their brazen plumage a splendid foil for her bronze beauty.
Her arrow was aimed full at Tawannears' chest, and she called to him with a kind of high disdain in a throaty dialect which none of us understood. But in the middle of her question she caught sight of Corlaer and me, and her lustrous brown eyes widened in an excess of surprise.
"Espanya!" she exclaimed.