Scarcely believing her own eyes, she urged Star on a run down the hill, as though hoping the village might be there when she reached the very spot where the camp had once been. But it was more lonely than even the desert had been. For out there she had believed that she had a home and now she had nothing.
Almost frantic, she jumped from her pony and ran to the spot where her father's tepee had been, calling his name over and over again, and begging him to come back to her. Nothing familiar met her eyes except the fire pit and the poles on which she had many times hung her father's moccasins to dry.
In a frenzy of grief and fear, she flung herself beside the fire pit, and Star, knowing that something was very wrong, called as loudly as he could. But no pony answered, and no Quahada woman or child came to comfort his little mistress who lay sobbing on the ground. So Star could do nothing but wait patiently.
Songbird's sobs finally stopped, and she raised herself slowly until she was sitting with her knees drawn up, her elbows propped upon them and her chin resting in her palms. For some time she sat staring at the top of the hill, while Star, only a few paces away, nibbling dry roots, paused frequently to look at her.
"My father came back while I was gone," she said to Star, at last. "He is angry with me and has moved the camp so that I cannot find him. But I will look for him until I find him and tell him I am sorry I did not obey him. I know he will not send me away from him, even though he is very angry. If he will not let me come into his tepee, I will wait at the entrance, and maybe some day he will forgive me."
Comforted by this thought, she ate rather sparingly of her food supply. Then she curled beside the fire pit where her father's tepee had once stood, and slept until morning, for she was very, very tired.
So soundly she slept that she did not know the coyotes, sneaking about the deserted camp site, had more than once tumbled over one another to avoid a sudden dash of an angry pony. Then, when they had sought safety from his teeth and heels, Star returned to his vigil over his little mistress.
The sun had not yet peeped over the rim of the world when Songbird and Star started on their search for the vanished Quahadas. Both of them watched for signs along the trail, and had no difficulty in finding where the lodge poles of the tepees had dragged on the ground.
Star also noticed something that puzzled him. No unshod hoof prints mingled with the Quahada trail, but there were many distinct marks of shod horses. He remembered that the Big Gray Horse and the Old White Horse, when they had first come to live among the Quahada ponies, wore strange metal things on the bottom of their hoofs, and they had told Star and the other ponies that all the white men's horses wore these things, which they called shoes.
The Quahada ponies had thought it very strange that the white men's horses could not travel on sharp rocks with bare feet, as the Indian ponies always did.