Where the tall pines dwindled to scrubby cedars he came again to his quarry. But now the doe was more alert and would not let him within bowshot. Only she looked back at him with big, sad eyes and trotted just away from range. And soon Night rolled down the mountain from behind him and filled the whispering forest and drowned the great, still plains beyond, and he lost her altogether.
“This is no deer,” said Pablo, gloomily, as he stretched himself under a twisted savino for the night, “but one who has wahr, the Power. And her eyes, how they are as those of women sorrowing, large and wet! But I will see the end, even though I die.” And weary with the rugged forty miles of the day, he was soon asleep.
As the blue flower of dawn bloomed from the eastern gray, Pablo rose, and smoked again the sacred smoke and inhaled the strengthful breath of Keem-eé-deh, and started anew on his awesome hunt. Soon he found the trail marked with dark blotches, and all day long he followed it. Just as the sun-house stood on the dark western ridges he came to the foot of a high swell, on whose summit gleamed the gray of strange, giant walls.
“It will be the bones of Ta-bi-rá,” thought Pablo aloud, “for my father often told me of the great city of the Pi-ro that was beyond Cuaray in the First Times, before the lakes of the plain were accursed to be salt, before Those-of-the-Old came to dwell on the river that runs from the Dark Lake of Tears. But how shall a deer come thus into the plains, which are only of the prong-horns?[33] Yet I have walked in her road all day, and here are her marks, going”—and he stopped, for his sharp ear caught a faint, far-off chant. It seemed to come from the ruins that crowned the hill; and, dropping to the earth, Pablo began to crawl from cedar to cedar, from rock to rock toward it. At the very crest of the rounded ridge was a long line of jumbled stone—the mound of fallen fortress houses—and beyond, from the gathering dusk, loomed the ragged, lofty walls of a vast temple. Under the shadows of the mound he crawled far around to the rear end of the gray wall, and then along the wall itself toward the huge buttresses that proclaimed its front. The chant was close at hand now—the singer was evidently within the ruined temple. But the tongue Pablo did not know. It was not so musical as his soft Tee-wahn, nor was it like the guttural of the Quéres—for that he knew also—and yet it was some voice of the Children of the Sun, and not the outlandish babble of the Americanoodeh, nor of the Spanish Wet-Head. It was not, then, some new tonto come to dig for the fabled gold of Ta-bi-rá—whose shafts yawned black in the gray bedrock and here and there through the very base of the great wall—but some Indian, and probably a medicine man, for the song was not as those of the careless. Pablo crouched in the darkness against the eastern end of the wall, listening, forgetful of the bewitched deer and of all else. Once in a wild swell of the song he thought he discerned a familiar word.
“THE BONES OF TA-BI-RÁ”
“Hoo-máh-no?” he kept repeating to himself. “Surely, the grandfather Desidério said me that word when he told of Them-of-the-Old, when They-with-Striped-Faces dwelt on yonder mesa. But they are all dead these many years.”
A swift, short flash split the darkness, and a growl of far thunder rolled across the ruins. Pablo glanced at the heaven. It was sown thick with the bright sky-seeds that flew up when the Coyote disobeyed the Trues and opened the sacred bag. From horizon to horizon there was not a cloud; but again the flash came, and again the mighty drum-beat of Those Above. Pablo crept to a breach in the wall, and peeped into the gloomy interior of the temple. Even as he looked, the zig-zag arrow of the Trues leaped again from ghostly wall to wall; and its blinding flight showed him that at which he caught his breath. For squat by a corner in the wall was a white-headed Indian waving his bare arms; and facing him and Pablo a dusky maiden, with drooping head. But her face was burned into his heart.