It was as truly a new marking for the Life Trail as had been the prayer made as a boy at the mesa shrine to answer the young moon message of the God of the Wilderness.
The maid stirred in his clasp and drew herself shyly away from him. At her first little movement, his arms grew tense about her, then they fell away, and he watched her, while with head averted from him, she arranged as well as might be her scant garb. There could be no words between them, but his touch was tender as he took her hand and led her out to the trail. He felt that she must know all he felt––and all the dreams into which the white shadow of her had entered––the sacred fourth shadow cast not by the body, but by the spirit, and linking itself with kindred spirit even while the human body breathed and moved and cast the black first shadow that all people may see.
The black first shadow all can see as a man moves or as he stands still, and the two gray shadows many can see after a man is on the death trail or when the breath has gone away. These remain with a man because they are of his body, but the white shadow is the shadow of the breath of the Great Mystery––it is as the perfume of the flower, the song of the bird, and the love of the man.
Fear lent the girl fleetness as she ran beside him in the night, and he marvelled at her.––No pueblo girl could have kept that pace. It was plain that she had 216 lived with the rovers of the desert. All the long hours had she been without food or drink, yet she ran like a boy, and with the swiftness of a boy.
When the dawn broke, and the morning star showed each the face of the other, they had reached the trail by the river. From the west came black wind-swept clouds to meet the sun, and in the south the angered God of Thunder spoke. Tahn-té looked at the girl whose eyes showed the weariness of the long strain––his thoughts dwelt on the woes she must have lived through ere he found her:––plainly she could not run unfed to the hills of his people, and plainly since the storm was meeting them, the wise time to halt must be ere it swept the valley.
From the well known trail he had departed before the dawn, and the way they went was a hard way across the heights where earth’s heart-fires had split the land and left great jagged monuments of stone;––and red ash as if even now scarcely free from the heat of flame.
Into one of the great crevices,––wide, and roofed by rock––he led the strange maid. Water came from a break in the great grey wall, and sand had drifted there on the wind, and the girl with a moan that was of weariness sank down there where the sand was. Tahn-té felt himself strangely hurt by that moan and wondered that it should be so.
She was only a maid after all, and the little woeful cry made him think of a hurt child he would have lifted in his arms and carried home to its mother. But the maid of the bluebird wing was far from mother and from her people;––no words had they exchanged in the long trail of the night, he knew not anything but that she spoke Navahu, and would have him think she wished to be Te-hua.
When she lay so very still that he could not see even the sign of life in her face, he went close and touched her––and then he saw that the spirit of her had truly gone on the trail of the twilight––she was no longer alive as other people are alive.