Jerry lay upon his back close beside the wagon. Go-yat-thlay detached a broken stake from the wagon and, with a shovel that was strapped to the side, drove it through Jerry and into the ground. Jerry groaned, but did not regain consciousness—then. For the first time the expression upon the face of the Be-don-ko-he underwent a change—he smiled.
One of his fellows called him to the opposite side of the wagon, where Annie lay, and pointed to the dead woman’s sun-tanned face and straight, black hair, and the high cheek bones that her Cherokee grandsire had bequeathed her.
“Indian,” he said to Go-yat-thlay.
The war chief nodded.
A second Indian emerged from the wagon, where he had been rummaging. He was grinning broadly. By one foot he held up for their inspection wee Andy MacDuff, whom he was about to swing heavily against the nearest iron tire when Go-yat-thlay stopped him with a gesture and holding out his hand received the descendant of one, long dead, who had been equally as savage as he. From northwestern Canada and from the Grampian Hills the seeds had met at last.
Wee Andy had seemingly inherited, through his mother, more Indian blood than flowed in her veins; at least he looked more an Indian than she, with his round face, his big, dark eyes, his straight, black hair.
Go-yat-thlay thought him an Indian; upon no other hypothesis can be explained the fact that instead of destroying him the savage chief carried him back to the hogans of his own people, notwithstanding the grumblings of Juh, who had wished to brain the spawn of the pindah lickoyee.
Thus, in the dome-shaped, thatched brush hut of Go-yat-thlay, in the arms of Sons-ee-ah-ray, his youngest squaw, ended the life history of Andy MacDuff and began that of a nameless, little Indian baby.
That night to the camp of the Be-don-ko-he and the Ned-ni came a runner from the headwaters of the Rio Mimbres. For over a hundred miles he had come on foot, across parched desert burning beneath the fiery rays of Chigo-na-ay, and over rugged mountains that no horse could travel, in sixteen hours.
Moccasins, of heavy buckskin with the toes turned up at right angles and terminating in a disc an inch and a quarter in diameter that formed a part of the rawhide sole, protected his feet and legs from the sharp stones and the cactus; a narrow head band of Apache-tanned doeskin kept his long, black hair from falling across his eyes; these and a G-string were his apparel. Some parched corn and dried meat that he had carried he had eaten on the way and he had drunk a little water from a bottle improvised from a piece of the large intestine of a horse. The only weapon that he carried was a knife.