"There was a fight going on in the passage. I could feel the cool draught from the open gate,--they must have opened it from the inside after scaling the wall by the broken plaster,--and smelled rather than saw that one man held the passage against Tse-tse. He was armed with a stone hammer, which is no sort of weapon for a narrow passage. Tse-tse had caught bow and quiver from the arms that hung always at the inner entrance of the passage, but made no attempt to draw. He was crouched against the wall, knife in hand, watching for an opening, when he heard me padding up behind him in the darkness.
"'Good! Kabeyde,' he cried softly; 'go for him.'
"I sprang straight for the opening I could see behind the Diné, and felt him go down as I cleared the entrance. Tse-tse panted behind me,--'Follow, follow!' I could hear the men my cry had waked, pouring out of the kivas, and knew that the Diné we had knocked over would be taken care of. We picked up the trail of those who had escaped, straight across the Rito and over the south wall, but it was an hour before I realized that they had taken Willow-in-the-Wind with them. Old Pitahaya was dead without doubt, and the man who had taken Willow-in-the-Wind was, by the smell, the same that had come in with Kokomo and the Koshare.
"We were hot on their trail, and by afternoon of the next day I was certain that they were making for Lasting Water. So I took Tse-tse over the rim of the Gap by a short cut which I had discovered, which would drop us back into the trail before they had done drinking. Tse-tse, who trusted me to keep the scent, was watching ahead for a sight of the quarry. Thus he saw the Diné before I winded them. I don't know whether they were just a hunting-party, or friends of those we followed. We dropped behind a boulder and Tse-tse counted while I lifted every scent.
"'Five,' he said, 'and the Finisher of the Paths of Our Lives knows how many more between us and Lasting Water!'
"We did not know yet whether they had seen us, but as we began to move again cautiously, a fox barked in the scrub that was not a fox. Off to our left another answered him. So now we were no longer hunters, but hunted.
"Tse-tse slipped his tunic down to his middle and, unbinding his queue, wound his long hair about his head to make himself look as much like a Diné as possible. I could see thought rippling in him as he worked, like wind on water. We began to snake between the cactus and the black rock toward the place where the fox had last barked."
"But toward them---" Oliver began.
"They were between us and Lasting Water,"--Moke-icha looked about the listening circle and the Indians nodded, agreeing. "When a fox barked again, Tse-tse answered with the impudent folly of a young kit talking back to his betters. Evidently the man on our left was fooled by it, for he sheered off, but within a bowshot they began to close on us again.
"We had come to a thicket of mesquite from which a man might slip unnoticed to the head of the gully, provided no one watched that particular spot too steadily. There we lay among the thorns and the shadows were long in the low sun. Close on our right a twig snapped and I began to gather myself for the spring. The ground sloped a little before us and gave the advantage. The hand of Tse-tse-yote came along the back of my neck and rested there. 'If a puma lay up here during the sun,' he whispered, 'this is the hour he would go forth to his hunting. He would go stretching himself after sleep and having no fear of man, for where Kabeyde lies up, who expects to find man also.' His hand came under my chin as his custom was in giving orders. This was how I understood it; this I did--"