“But you—” Bettina hesitated.
The young fellow threw back his head and, then realizing that custom demanded it, lifted his hat. He was dressed as any other young college man might be, except that his clothes were simple and a little shabby.
“I am not entirely Indian,” he continued, still so serious that Bettina was unconscious of there being anything out of the way in his confidence. “My mother was a Spanish woman, I have been told; but she died at my birth and now my father is again married and has children by a woman of his own race. Yet I am glad to return to my own people, to wear again the moccasin of brown deer-skin and the head-band of scarlet.”
Instinctively the young man’s pose changed. Bettina could see that his shoulders lifted and that he breathed more deeply. He stood there on the platform of the most civilized and civilizing monster in the world—a great express train—gazing out on the fields as if he had been an Indian chief at the door of his own tepee, surveying his own domains.
Naturally Bettina was fascinated. What young girl could have failed to have been interested? And Bettina had lived more in books and dreams than in realities.
“We are also going to Arizona,” Bettina added quickly. “I have never been West before, though I have longed to always. We are to camp somewhere on a ranch not far from the Painted Desert. Do Indians live near there and would you mind telling me something of them? Are they still warlike? Sometimes I feel a little nervous, for we are to be only a party of girls and our Camp Fire guardian, except that we are to have a man and his wife for our cook and guide.”
For an instant the young fellow laughed as any other boy would have done, and showing white, fine teeth. Afterwards he relapsed into the conventional Indian gravity.
“My own people are peaceful and always have been, except when we have been attacked by other Indians. Hopi means ‘peaceful people,’ and we have lived in Arizona, the land of ‘few springs,’ since before the days when your written history begins. The Apaches have always been our bitterest enemies. But they will not harm you—the great hand of your United States Government is over us all,” he concluded.
And Bettina could not tell whether he spoke in admiration or in bitterness.
It was growing cooler and she shivered—not in reality from the cold half so much as from her interest in the conversation.