"They are talking now," she said to herself. "They are almost all talking. They are helping me remember. I'm sure that was my mother—my white mother. But where is my white father? He was not there at all. I must look for him again tomorrow. We must ride off away from the camp, where nobody can see us, and we can talk as much as we please."
"We" meant herself and Ni-ha-be, of course, but it also meant her three prizes. She had brought them to bed with her on her soft buffalo-skin, and she was hugging them closely now. It seemed to her as if they were alive, and had come to tell her almost anything she could think to ask.
Then it was all so still, and she was so tired with her journey and her excitement, that she fell asleep at last, to dream of more people and stranger things than had ever come to her mind before, sleeping or waking.
When morning came there was no need for Rita to propose a ride on horseback. Ni-ha-be spoke of it first, and for the self-same reason; but there was nothing unusual about it, for they almost lived in the saddle, like genuine daughters of the great Apache nation.
That, too, was why nobody paid them any attention when, an hour or so after their late breakfast, they were seen to scold a couple of wild-looking boys into bringing up their horses for them. The chief's two favorites were entitled to that much of service, and were apt to insist upon it.
For a while the very delight of galloping up and down the valley on such swift and beautiful animals as they were riding almost drove out of their minds the thought of talking leaves; but when, a little later, Many Bears slowly arose from a long fit of thinking, there in front of his lodge, and said to Red Wolf, "Call Rita," Rita was nowhere to be seen.
"Find her. Tell her to come and bring me the white men's medicine, talking leaves."
Red Wolf sprang upon the nearest horse—and there were several standing ready for sudden errands—and dashed away in search of his truant sisters.
Mother Dolores could tell him nothing, but his loud, half-angry questionings drew together a knot of squaws and children, two or three of whom were ready to point toward the north-eastern slope of the valley, where it crept up through the pine-forest into the mountains, and tell him he would have to hunt in that direction.
He was ready for it, of course; but he reined in his mustang in front of his father long enough to tell him the cause of the delay.