The Colonel whistled.
“There’s superstition for you, Scotty! I’ve heard that the Navaho are the most superstitious of all Indian tribes. We’ll have to handle this with the utmost tact, or there’ll likely be a big row over it. This boy is doomed, unless we can manage to interfere somehow, though. I know Indians! Somehow this freak panther must be explained, and so they have to make someone the scapegoat over it! We’ll ride in and see Neyani. Perhaps we can find out something from him about Sid. It looks to me, though, as if Ruler had followed a Navaho pony here, and fooled us.”
They rode to the hogan, slowly. An old squaw was sitting before the partly finished blanket, pulling alternately at the warp sticks and passing little balls of colored yarn through various sheds of its warp strings. The young girl had seated herself on the sand before the hogan and was dipping wool yarns in her dye bowls of red, black and yellow dyes. As they approached she looked at them shyly and then picked up a hank of dry wool and caught the end around the staple on her spindle. Rolling it across her thigh, she drew out the lengths of spun yarn, allowing it to coil itself loose around the spindle as each length was twisted to the proper thickness.
“Where Neyani, son?” asked the Colonel after bowing to the squaw and the maiden, who returned his salutations with frightened smiles.
The Navaho youth waved his hand toward a corner of a pole sheep corral which jutted out of the brush back of the hogan. Evidently he was not welcome in his father’s presence, for he immediately dropped back and went over to where his silver forge lay smoking under the shade of the thick desert juniper.
The party dismounted and tied their horses, while Big John put leashes on the remaining dogs, for there would surely be half-wild shepherd dogs out in the corral, and they had no wish to open up the proceedings with a dog-fight.
The Colonel led the way around the hogan. Their appearance was greeted by a chorus of barks from two shaggy shepherd dogs, half coyote, that guarded Neyani’s sheep. The old fellow was kneeling over a struggling animal under the shade of a low bush, putting some sort of healing vegetable compound on deep, bloody gashes in its side.
Seamed and wrinkled with age, with silver locks hanging in thick mats over his ears, Neyani’s eyes were, nevertheless, bright with the unconquerable spirit of a wild and free desert people. Just now there was deep trouble in them, and he looked up at Colonel Colvin with something like relief, for he evidently connected his coming in some way with Major Hinchman, the White Father of all the Navahos.
“How, Neyani! What’s the trouble, bear?” asked Colonel Colvin, pointing down at the wounded sheep and endeavoring to draw the old fellow out by a leading question.
Neyani shook his head gloomily. “No, cougar. Dsilyi send him. Plenty sheep, he kill.”