“Sit and rest and I will bring refreshment,” Winona said as she went within, soon to return with steaming coffee and a hard cake made from Indian meal.
The chief having retired, Winona sat beside Tom on the adobe porch and asked many questions about Virginia.
An hour later Tom bade the Indian girl farewell, and with little Red Feather as guide, he again rode toward the north. As he looked ahead at the rugged, uninviting mountains, in his heart there was an impulse to whirl his horse about and gallop back to the V. M. Ranch, whatever the consequences, but instead he followed the lad who led the way across an ever rising sandy waste where there was no sign of a trail. Had there been one the frequent whirlwinds would have hidden it with sand.
Tom wondered if the Indian boy had the same unerring instinct that a bird seems to have in its flight. Once only did the small guide pause and listen. Tom, too, drew rein, but heard nothing, although it was evident that the Indian lad did. He was intently watching a sandhill nearby, around which, in another moment, there appeared a bunch of wild, shaggy ponies, but, upon seeing Tom and Red Feather, with a shrill whistle-like neighing, they whirled about and galloped in the other direction and were soon hidden in a cloud of sand.
The Indian lad looked back and his white teeth gleamed as he said, “Much pony-wild.”
That was his first attempt at speaking the English language and would have surprised Tom greatly had he not recalled that Red Feather was probably a pupil in Winona’s little class, and so, riding closer, he asked, “Is it far yet we go? Long way?”
The lad shook his head. He had understood. “One up, one down,” was his curious reply. Tom decided that the little fellow meant that they would cross one more range of mountains and then descend into a valley, nor was he wrong, for they were soon climbing a clearly defined mountain trail and at last reached a high point from which Tom could see, far below them, a wide, fertile valley.
Red Feather drew rein and pointed. “Sheep,” he said. “I go back.” Not waiting for Tom to express his gratitude, and without a formal farewell, the Indian lad returned by the way he had come.
Tom, believing that the sheep ranch he sought lay in the valley below, started the descent.
As he neared the group of low, white-washed buildings, Tom felt in his heart a strange loneliness and a sense of homesickness for the V. M. Ranch.