“Shoz-Dijiji!”
Margaret Cullis looked up quickly. Was it the intonation of the girl’s voice as she spoke the name? The older woman frowned and looked down at her work again. “What did he have to say?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Oh, you didn’t see him to talk with?”
“Yes, but he wouldn’t talk to me—just fell back on that maddening ‘No sabe’ that they use with strangers.”
“Why do you suppose he did that?” asked Mrs. Cullis.
“I hurt him—the last time I saw him,” replied Wichita.
“Hurt one of Geronimo’s renegades! Child, it can’t be done.”
“They’re human,” replied the girl. “I learned that in the days that I spent in Geronimo’s camp while Chief Loco was out with his hostiles. Among themselves they are entirely different people from those we are accustomed to see on the reservation. No one who has watched them with their children, seen them at their games, heard them praying to Dawn and Twilight, to the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars as they cast their sacred hoddentin to the winds would ever again question their possession of the finer instincts of sentiment and imagination.
“Because they do not wear their hearts upon their sleeves, because they are not blatant in the declaration of their finer emotions, does not mean that they feel no affection or that they are incapable of experiencing spiritual suffering.”