Page:B M Bower - Heritage of the Sioux.djvu/62

THE HERITAGE OF THE SIOUX hidden in a thicket. They had been honored with a "close-up" scene, those two spotted calves, and were destined to further honors which they did not suspect and could not appreciate.

They slept now, as slept the two camps upon the two slopes that lay moon-bathed at midnight. Back where the moon was making the barren mountains a wonderland of deep purple and black and silvery gray and brown, a coyote yapped a falsetto message and was answered by one nearer at hand—his mate, it might be. In a bush under the bank that made of it a black blot in the unearthly whiteness of the sand, a little bird fluttered uneasily and sent a small, inquiring chirp into the stillness. From somewhere farther up the arroyo drifted a faint, aromatic odor of cigarette smoke.

Had you been there by the bush you could not have told when Annie-Many-Ponies passed by; you would not have seen her—certainly you could not have heard the soft tread of her slim, moccasined feet. Yet she passed the bush and the bank and went away up the arroyo, silent as the shadows themselves, swift as the coyote that trotted over a nearby ridge to meet her mate nearer the 50