At sunset Shefford stood with Nas Ta Bega facing the west. The Indian was magnificent in repose. He watched the sun go down upon the day that had seen the burial of the last of his family. He resembled an impassive destiny, upon which no shocks fell. He had the light of that flaring golden sky in his face, the majesty of the mountain in his mien, the silence of the great gulf below on his lips. This educated Navajo, who had reverted to the life of his ancestors, found in the wildness and loneliness of his environment a strength no white teaching could ever have given him. Shefford sensed in him a measureless grief, an impenetrable gloom, a tragic acceptance of the meaning of Glen Naspa's ruin and death—the vanishing of his race from the earth. Death had written the law of such bitter truth round Glen Naspa's lips, and the same truth was here in the grandeur and gloom of the Navajo.
“Bi Nai,” he said, with the beautiful sonorous roll in his voice, “Glen Naspa is in her grave and there are no paths to the place of her sleep. Glen Naspa is gone.”
“Gone! Where? Nas Ta Bega, remember I lost my own faith, and I have not yet learned yours.”
“The Navajo has one mother—the earth. Her body has gone to the earth and it will become dust. But her spirit is in the air. It shall whisper to me from the wind. I shall hear it on running waters. It will hide in the morning music of a mocking-bird and in the lonely night cry of the canyon hawk. Her blood will go to make the red of the Indian flowers and her soul will rest at midnight in the lily that opens only to the moon. She will wait in the shadow for me, and live in the great mountain that is my home, and for ever step behind me on the trail.”
“You will kill Willetts?” demanded Shefford.
“The Navajo will not seek the missionary.”
“But if you meet him you'll kill him?”
“Bi Nai, would Nas Ta Bega kill after it is too late? What good could come? The Navajo is above revenge.”
“If he crosses my trail I think I couldn't help but kill him,” muttered Shefford in a passion that wrung the threat from him.
The Indian put his arm round the white man's shoulders.