She looked at him with mystification in her eyes, but did not ask what he meant, and returned to her mother.
“I have eaten. Now we go, is not?”
“Yes, mother. The kind man says we go on, and the red men will not follow us.”
“Good. I have afraid of the men ‘rouge.’ Your father knows not fear; only I know it.”
Soon they were mounted and traveling up the trail as before, the little pack mule following in the rear. No breeze stirred to make the frosty air bite more keenly, and the women rode in comparative comfort, with their hands wrapped in their shawls to keep them warm. They did not try to converse, or only uttered a word now and then in their own tongue. Amalia’s spirit was enrapt in the beauty around and above and below her, so that she could not have spoken more than the merest word for a reply had she tried.
The moonlight brought all the immediate surroundings into sharp relief, and the distant hills in receding gradations seemed to be created out of molten silver touched with palest gold. Above, the vault of the heavens was almost black, and the stars were few, but clear. Even the stones that impeded the horses’ feet seemed to be made of silver. The depths below them seemed as vast and black as the vault above, except for the silver bath of light that touched the tops of the gigantic trees at the bottom of the cañon around which they were climbing.
The silence of this vastness was as fraught with mystery as the scene, and was broken only by the scrambling of the horses over the stones and their heavy breathing. Thus throughout the rest of the night they wended steadily upward, only pausing now and then to allow the animals to breathe, and then on. At last a thing occurred to break the stillness and strike terror to Amalia’s heart. It had occurred once the day before when the silence was most profound. A piercing cry rent the air, that began in a scream of terror and ended in a long-drawn wail of despair.
Amalia slipped from her horse and stumbled over the rough ground to her mother’s side and poured forth a stream 189 of words in her own tongue, and clasped her arms about the rigid form that did not bend toward her, but only sat staring into the white night as if her eye perceived a sight from which she could not turn away.
“Look at me, mother. Oh, try to make her look at me!” The big man lifted her from the horse, and she relaxed into trembling. “There, it is gone now. Walk with me, mother;” and the two walked for a while, holding hands, and Amalia talked unceasingly in low, soothing tones.