When they met, Star pawed the ground in his delight, and his mother kept nipping his shoulder with her teeth to tell how glad she was to find him. Later, as she trotted beside him, when Quannah and Songbird again rode forward, Running Deer told her colt how she, returning to camp with Quannah, had found that Star and Songbird both were missing.
After the white soldiers had captured and taken Quannah and all the braves and women and children to the garrison, Running Deer, assured now that her master would not need her for some time, stole quietly from the garrison one night to search for Star and Songbird; for Star was very dear to her, and she had noticed, too, how Quannah, when alone, grieved for his beloved daughter who was lost. She had come back to the Quahada camp and waited there several days, feeling sure that Star and Songbird would return. When they did not, she continued on her way to find them, and finally came to the Great Desert of the Staked Plains. With sorrowing heart she had reluctantly turned her steps back to the garrison, for now she knew not where to search for them on the vast, trackless sand plains; and she herself was weak and lean from thirst and hunger. Imagine, then, her joy upon finding Star and his little mistress safe and happy. But neither Star nor Running Deer knew that they alone were left of the once great Quahada pony herd. All the others were dead.
As the sun went down that evening, Quannah and Songbird, with the Big Gray Horse, Running Deer, and Star, reached the place where the new village was to be built. Back of them, on the road, the Quahadas toiled, but the eyes that watched the setting sun were hopeful. They knew that it would rise again to-morrow.
Chapter XXI
Quannah kept his pledge. Never again did the Quahada Comanches war with the white people, for when their chief had given his word of honour, it became their honour to uphold him and keep his promise.
Near the garrison of Fort Sill he taught his tribe the best ways of the white men, and he did his utmost to preserve a sense of fairness and justice in all his transactions with his own people as well as with the white men. The children of the Quahadas were educated, and so Quannah's little daughter was taught the things that white children learn.
Songbird saw her father honoured by the most prominent men of the United States; saw him living in a large house that was built and furnished and given to him as a token of regard from white people who had learned to understand and admire the "White Comanche Chief." She saw him a guest in homes of the most noted men in the great city of Washington, and she watched him ride in the big parade in Washington when Theodore Roosevelt was elected for the second term as President of the United States.
All that Moko had predicted the day Songbird had sat watching the old Picture Maker work on the big buffalo robe had come true. Even Quannah's desire to have his mother, Preloch, and his baby sister, Prairie Flower, come back to sleep among the Quahada people had been fulfilled.
The Congress of the United States, twenty-four years after Quannah had given his pledge of peace passed a law which gave an appropriation of a thousand dollars for a monument to be erected to the memory of Cynthia Ann Parker, whom the Quahadas called Preloch. It not only honoured the mother of Quannah, but was also an acknowledgment of the valued services of her son, in coöperating with the United States to keep peace between the Indians and the white people.