“Oh, Wanny—it means he’s found my uncle—dead!” exclaimed Genie, in awe.
“Yes, Genie,” replied Adam, with a hand of sympathy upon her shoulder. “We know now. He’ll never come back.”
With the buckle in her hands the girl slowly walked toward the graves of her parents.
Charley Jim mounted his pony to ride away.
“Chief—tell me of Oella,” said Adam.
The Indian gazed down upon Adam with somber eyes. Then his lean, sinewy hand swept up with stately and eloquent gesture to be pressed over his heart.
“Oella dead,” he replied, sonorously, and then he looked beyond Adam, out across the lonesome land, beyond the ranges, perhaps to the realm of his red gods. Adam read the Indian gesture. Oella had died of a broken heart.
* * * * *
He stood there at the edge of the oasis, stricken mute, as his old Indian friend turned to go back across the valley to the Coahuila encampment. A broken heart! That superb Indian maiden, so lithe and tall and strong, so tranquil, so sure—serene of soul as the steady light of her midnight eyes—dead of a broken heart! She had loved him—a man alien to her race—a wanderer and a stranger within her gates, and when he had gone away life became unendurable. Another mystery of the lonely, gray, melancholy wastelands! Adam quivered there in the grip of it all.
* * * * *