"My daughter will reflect," Black Cat answered, "of what does the White Lily of the Valley complain? We are only doing to her what has been done to us frequently—that is the law of the prairies."
Black Cat rose, giving Doña Clara a mingled glance of tenderness and pity, and slowly left the tent.
After his departure the poor girl fell into a state of utter prostration; the horror of her position appeared before her in all its truth.
The night passed then for her, weeping and sobbing, alone, amid the laughter and songs of the Apaches, who were celebrating the arrival of the warriors of their detachment.
The next morning, at daybreak, the warriors started again, several men watching the movements of the prisoner; but Black Cat kept aloof from her.
The Indians marched along the Gila, through a yellowish prairie. Gloomy lines of chaparral, intersected by trees, whose red or grayish-brown colour contrasted with the yellow frondage of the poplars, bordered the road; on the horizon rose grand hills of a whitish grey, covered with patches of coloured grass and dark green cedar.
The band undulated like an immense serpent in this grand desert, proceeding towards the village, whose approaches could already be detected by the mephitic miasmas, exhaling from scaffoldings, seen in the distance, on which the Indians keep their dead, and let them decompose, and dry in the sun, instead of burying them.
At about two o'clock the warriors entered the village, amid the shouts of inhabitants, and the sound of the chichikouis, mingled with the furious barking of the dogs.
This village, built on the top of a hill, formed a tolerably regular circle. It was a considerable number of earth huts, built without order or symmetry. Wooden palisades, twelve feet high, served it as ramparts, and at equal distances four bastions of earth supplied with loopholes, and covered inside and outside with intertwined willow branches, completed the system of defence. In the centre of the village was a vacant space, of about forty feet in diameter, in the centre of which was the "ark of the first man," a species of small round cylinder, formed of wide planks, four feet high, round which creepers twined. To the west of the spot we have just described was the medicine lodge, where the festivals and religious rites of the Apaches were celebrated. A mannikin made of animal skins, with a wooden head, painted black, and wearing a fur cap, decorated with plumes, was fixed on a tall pole, to represent the spirit or genius of evil. Other quaint figures of the same nature were dispersed in various squares of the village, and were offerings made to the lord of life.
Between the huts was a great number of several storied scaffoldings, on which the maize, wheat, and vegetables of the tribe were drying.