Warriors gathered about him, asking many questions; surprised to see him in the flesh, whom they had thought dead. He told them of the fight with the white soldiers, of the scattering of the balance of the hostiles; that the troops might be following them down into Mexico. He did not ask for Juh; that was not his way. He waited. Perhaps Juh would come soon, but he was impatient. A terrible thought smote him.
“Were many of the Ned-ni killed when you fought the white-eyes?” he asked.
“No,” they told him, “two warriors, whose bodies we brought along and buried, and a squaw was missing.” They did not mention her name. Seldom do the Apaches call their dead by name. But there was no need—Shoz-Dijiji knew that they spoke of Ish-kay-nay.
“Was she killed by the soldiers?” asked Shoz-Dijiji.
“We do not know. Juh would not return to find out.”
“Juh—he is not here,” remarked Shoz-Dijiji, casually. That was as near as he would come to asking where Juh was.
“He is hunting in the mountains,” said a warrior, waving an informatory hand in the direction of a rugged ridge above the camp.
Shoz-Dijiji walked away. He could not wait. He went from shelter to shelter, talking, but only to throw off suspicion, for he knew that some of them must guess why he was here. When he could, he slipped away among the trees and moved rapidly up the shoulder of the ridge, diagonally that he might cross the spoor of the man he sought, nor had he long to go before he picked up the imprint of a great moccasin, such a moccasin as Juh might wear.
A human tiger, then, he tracked his prey. Up rugged mountainsides ran the trail, across rocky hogbacks where none but an Apache eye might trace it, down into dank ravines and up again along the bold shoulder of a mighty peak. It was there that Shoz-Dijiji heard something moving just beyond the curve of the mountain ahead of him.
He stopped and listened. The thing was approaching, already he had interpreted it, the sound of moccasined feet moving through low brush. Shoz-Dijiji waited. Two seconds, three, five. The figure of a man loomed suddenly before him. It was Juh. The end of the hate-trail had been reached. Juh was returning to camp.