The bushes were very thick around the spot where she at last threw herself upon the grass. She had never lived in any lodge where there were doors to shut behind her, or if she had, houses and doors were alike forgotten; but she knew that her quick ears would give her notice of any approaching footsteps.
There they lay now before her, the three magazines, and it seemed to Rita as if they had come on purpose to see her, and were looking at her.
No two of them were alike. They did not even belong to the same family. She could tell that by their faces.
Slowly and half timidly she turned the first leaf; it was the cover-leaf of the nearest.
A sharp exclamation sprang to her lips. "I have seen her! Oh, so long ago! It is me, Rita. I wore a dress like that once. And the tall squaw behind her, with the robe that drags on the ground, I remember her too. How did they know she was my mother?"
Rita's face had been growing very white, and now she covered it with both her hands, and began to cry.
The picture was one of a fine-looking lady and a little girl of it might be seven or eight years. Not Rita and her mother, surely, for the lady wore a coronet upon her head, and carried a sceptre in her hand, but the little girl looked very much as Rita must have looked at her age. It was a picture of some Spanish princess and her daughter, but like many pictures of such people that are printed, it would have served as well for a portrait of almost anybody else. Particularly, as it seemed to Rita, of herself and her mother.
"He is not there. Why did they not put him in? I loved him best. Oh, he was so good to me! He had plenty of talking leaves, too, and he taught them to speak to me. I will look and see if he is here."
Rita was talking aloud to herself, but her own voice sounded strange to her, with its Indian words, and ways of expression. She was listening without knowing it for another voice, for several of them, and none of them spoke Apache.
She turned leaf after leaf with fluttering haste in her eager search for that other face she had spoken of.