"I have given her a name. She is Oo-Mee, the Pigeon."
Slim Buck started at the strange note in her voice.
"The Pigeon," he repeated,
"Yes, Oo-Mee, the Pigeon," Yellow Bird nodded. She was not looking at them. In the firelight her eyes were glowing pools. Her body had grown a little tense. Without asking Jolly Roger's permission she placed the tress of Nada's hair in her bosom. "Oo-Mee, the Pigeon," she said again, looking far away. "That is her name, because the Pigeon flies fast and straight and true. Over forests and lakes and worlds the Pigeon flies. It is tireless. It is swift. It always—flies home."
Slim Buck rose quietly to his feet.
"Come," he whispered, looking at Jolly Roger,
Yellow Bird did not look at them or speak to them, and Slim Buck—with his hand on Jolly Roger's arm—pulled him gently away. In his eyes was a little something of fear, and yet along with it a sublime faith.
"Her spirit will be with Oo-Mee, the Pigeon, tonight," he said in a voice struck with awe. "It will go to this place which you have described, and it will live in the body of the girl, and through Yellow Bird it will tell you tomorrow what has happened, and what is going to happen."
In the edge of the shore-willows Jolly Roger stood for a time watching Yellow Bird as she sat under the stars, motionless as a figure graven out of stone. He felt a curious tingling at his heart, something stirring uneasily in his breast, and he stood alone even after Slim Buck had stretched himself out in the soft sand to sleep. He was not superstitious. Yet it was equally a part of his philosophy and his creed to believe in the overwhelming power of the mind. "If you have faith enough, and think hard enough, you can think anything until it comes true," he had told himself more than once. And he knew Yellow Bird possessed that illimitable faith, and that behind her divination lay generations and centuries of an unbreakable certainty in the power of mind over matter. He realized his own limitations, but a mysterious voice in the still night seemed whispering to him that in the crude wisdom of Yellow Bird's brain lay the secret to strange achievement, and that on this night her mind might perform for him what he, in his greater wisdom, would call a miracle. He had seen things like that happen. And he sat down in the sand, sleepless, and with Peter at his feet waited for Yellow Bird to stir.
He could see the dull shimmer of starlight in her hair, but the rest of her was a shadow that gave no sign of life. The camp was asleep. Even the dogs were buried in their wallows of sand, and the last red spark of the fires had died out. The hour passed, and another hour followed, and the lids of Jolly Roger's eyes grew heavier as the fading stars seemed to be sinking deeper into infinity. At last he slept, with his back leaning against a sand-dune the children had made. He dreamed, and was flying through the air with Yellow Bird. She was traveling swift and straight, like an arrow, and he had difficulty in keeping up with her, and at last he cried out for her to wait—that he could go no farther. The cry roused him. He opened his eyes, and found cool, gray dawn in the sky. Peter, alert, was muzzling his hand. Slim Buck lay in the sand, still asleep. There was no stir in the camp. And then, with a sudden catch in his breath, he looked toward Yellow Bird's tepee.