Dêh-Yān had withdrawn within the wigwam: crouched there in the gloom she heard the crackle and snap of piled brush. The small place was dominated by the presence of mortality in dissolution. Her mind was divided, half with her dead, half turned jealously towards the workers without. She felt that they were listening—knew their minds and the workings of them, knew that hopes of respite were dawning, glancings forward, previsions of a possible sequel other than the one which each feared. One event was coming home to them, the super-sensitive faculties of the savage at full strain could get no tidings of the chief who had withdrawn himself from his braves for two days. This absence, this silence spoke but one word—Death!
Then, as she mused, something moved in the darkness behind her with the quiet, unbreathing, soft sinuosity of a snake. Turning swiftly she pounced and caught—a slim ankle! Her captive lay mute, panting thickly, shuddering strongly. Dêh-Yān without speaking ran an open hand over the features, followed out the limbs, and beside the relaxed hand lay something which she had not handled for many a year, reminiscent of her far-away youth, her own personal fire-sticks, long disused.
"This is little Fallow-Doe," she said softly and without anger, naming her dead lord's favourite grand-daughter, "but, what does young Fallow-Doe here? unbidden in the place of death?"
"O mother," whimpered the girl, "I knew—I could not help it—I thought—yes, I have eyes too—thou art leaving us! Oh, do not forsake thy children! What shall we do?—To whom shall we look? Yes, He there is dead—we know; but, how we know not. All must die. Our times come. Maybe his time came. I do not think that any of the tribe bore a black heart towards him. But, O my mother, if it is Obi (and thou knowest best), charge whom thou wilt. Charge me! I will die for him, though my heart is as white as a full moon; but, oh, do not leave us!"
The mourning widow withheld her answer, and when the word came, it was breathed softly and motherly. "Little girl, thy heart is white, I know it; but no whiter than the hearts of the rest. Get thee gone now by the way thou camest, and say nothing of thy coming hither until the third day at evening."
The child slipped eel-like under the tent-skirts and into the loosely-piled faggots. Dêh-Yān patted the space left vacant and smiled, for the fire-sticks were gone too. She arose, gravely smiling, and took from a skin wallet that hung high a pair of round stones, dense and very heavy, and struck them softly one against the other, and lo! the darkness was lightened with pale green sparks, for these were nodules of pyrites, her latest discovery, and one which would die with her to be rediscovered in later times. "You will not fail me, I think," she murmured, and began to arrange the tinder, crooning the first notes of her death-song to herself as she worked.
Wave after wave of memory flowed in upon her out of the long-forgotten past, and with each some trait of her dead husband travelled towards her, towered and subsided. Battle touches, his shield before her, himself exposed, his shout of triumph rang in her ears as her shaft went home. Or a hot, breath-catching moment in the life of a big-game huntress, a lioness with ears laid to her skull, and with head, neck, back and tail in one level tawny line, broke covert and made for her snarling, and again it was Pŭl-Yūn who had stridden between her and the wrinkled black lips. She saw him leap the fence of the enclosure and throw himself in the path of the stampeding herd of buck, when the leaders of the driven mob swerved in the very jaws of the hopo and were breaking back. What a man he had been! yes, they had lived, they two!
And about the time that the heat of the day began to wane, the watching tribe heard her voice raised in song within the royal wigwam, and certain duller sounds as of soft stones pounded, and, whilst all strained eye and ear, fearing the approach of the unknown with hearts high in their throats, the afternoon sunshine was dimmed by a thin smoke, and above the ridge of the wigwam, where the poles crossed, the air grew glassy like troubled water. Then, whilst the dry sticks crackled, and here and there a green one spat, the pale flame that is invisible in the sunlight turned the wood grey and shrivelled the skin hangings. The death-chant pealed intermittently from within, interrupted by coughing, but ever resumed. Soon the whole pile was alight, and on every side the crowd, though pressed upon from outside, was driven back by the heat.
"And, oh, I did steal these—And I did pray her not to leave us!" wept Fallow-Doe.
Strong shudders shook the throng of watchers. Wild men, whose grandsires this woman (think—a woman!) had brought to heel, whose fathers she had trained to the bow and schooled in her battle tactics, wept, actually wept!