“Mark!” he called. “Indians! Navaho!—See it, sir?” he asked, turning to point out the patch to the Colonel. “Looks like a blanket or something, over yonder in that grove of mesquite.”
Ruler redoubled his bays, and the gray sand spurted from his heels. He headed straight for the grove. A tiny wisp of smoke rose from one side of it, curling lazily away in the desert breeze. The patch of color had now developed into a square shape, striped and crisscrossed with a pattern of some sort, and under the shade of a mesquite the forked uprights and cross poles of the blanket loom gradually developed and became distinct to the eye.
Then, with the suddenness of realization, they all became aware of the dirt mound of the hogan, looming up before them. A gray blanket hanging in its door had been pushed aside, and a young Indian girl had stepped out with a spindle of wool yarn in one hand and a pottery jar in the other. The black square that she opened up immediately gave the hogan shape around it. It was large and conical in shape, and cunningly planted with aloes, yucca and even sage, so that it looked about the same as the desert soil around it.
The girl peered at them, and then ran around to one side, where the smoke came from under the shade of a juniper. A young buck appeared, the red bandanna around his forehead the most conspicuous thing about him at that distance. Big John shouted to the dogs and reined up his pony, for a hound on a hot scent is quite likely to attack any human that gets in his way. Ruler turned and circled back inquiringly, for he was well trained to voice, while a pistol shot across the sand halted the pups, and they came around to follow in his lead. Scotty and the Colonel closed up, and the party of whites halted, while Big John dismounted and slipped a leash on Ruler.
The young buck came running out to greet them with a smile of welcome on his bronzed face. “How, white Father Hinch,” he called out, evidently taking the Colonel for Hinchman. He slowed up and walked diffidently toward them, his white cotton shirt, open at the neck, decorated with silver jewelry and his blue cloth leggins gaudy with beadwork.
“How, Injun,—where white boy?” demanded Big John, sternly.
The youth looked mystified, and then his mobile face took on a lugubrious expression as he broke out into lamentations in unintelligible Navaho. Then, in broken English, reversing his sentences in direct translation from the Navaho—“Oh, White Father—the Dene much, much trouble have!” he cried, addressing the Colonel. “The Black Panther of Dsilyi, he come! Many sheep, he kill! My father that me have done big wrong, he say.” He almost wept, seizing Colonel Colvin’s hand and begging him with pleading eyes to dismount and come at once to their hogan.
“This must be that son of old Neyani’s that we heard about at Hinchman’s, boys,” said the Colonel. “We’ll have to get this trouble of the black panther off his chest before we can get anything more out of him concerning Sid. Funny he doesn’t say anything of his being here, though!”
“There, boy,—me come from Father Hinchman—me make all right!” he soothed, smiling at the young Navaho. “You Neyani’s son?”
“Neyani’s son I was,” said the young Navaho, sadly. “That I did wrong he say, and so Dsilyi his panther send. Now I no more son of his, he say!”