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I

During the interval, Laughing Boy moved most of his horses a couple of days’ ride farther north, not far from Zhil Clichigi, where he penned them in a box canyon in which there was a spring and still a little feed. He bought provisions at a trading post on the road to T’o Hatchi. Slim Girl had confessed to him that the story about the warrant out for him on account of the Pah-Ute had been a lie, but, all things considered, she felt it best that he stay away from town. He said that it had seemed a little odd that there should be so much trouble over a Pah-Ute.

“No,” she said, “they do not want any shooting.”

“That is true. Whenever there is cause for a fight, they want to send men to do the fighting, and only let us come as guides, like that time with Blunt Nose. They must be very fond of fighting, I think, and they have not enough of their own, so they do other people’s fighting for them. It is a good thing and a bad thing.

“I do not understand them, those people. They stop us from raiding the Stone House People and the Mexicans, which is a pity; but they stop the Utes and the Comanches from raiding us. They brought in money and silver, and these goods for our clothes. They bring up water out of the ground for us. We are better off than before they came.

“But yet it does not matter whether they do good things or bad things or stupid things, I think. When one or two come among us, they are not bad. If they are, sometimes we kill them, as we did Yellow Beard at Kien Dotklish. But a lot of them and we cannot live together, I think. They do good things, and then they do something like taking a child away to school for five years. Around Lukachukai there are many men who went to school; they wear their hair short; they all hate Americans. I understand that now. There is no reason in what they do, they are blind, but in the end they will destroy everything that is different from them, or else what is different must destroy them. If you destroyed everything in me that is different from them, there would only be a quarter of a man left, I think. Look at what they tried to do to you. And yet they were not deliberately trying.

“Well, soon we shall be where there are few Americans, very few. And we shall see that our children never go to school.”

“Soon we shall be where there are very few Americans”; that thought was constant in his mind. He was very happy, it was like a second honeymoon. He had kept all the good things of life, and he had saved himself. He saw that his wife depended on him; she was very tender and rather grave. He understood her gravity, in view of her wound and all that had happened. Soon in new surroundings there would be cause for only happiness. A little readjustment, a little helping her into a less comfortable life, but her courage would make nothing of that.

She was very tender and very grave, and she was thinking a great deal. That crisis like a blast of white light had shown her life and herself, it had ended her old independence. She had unravelled her blanket back to the beginning, and started again with a design which could not be woven without Laughing Boy, and she knew that there could be no other design.

It would not be easy at first to be competent and satisfactory up there; to make herself accepted and liked, to do the dull things, to watch sheep and make her own bread. But she would, and she could. They would go to Oljeto, Moonlight Water, a pretty name and a pretty place, if a childhood memory were true. She had relatives there, and it was far from the long arm of the Americans⁠—wild country, with the unexplored fastnesses towards Tsé Nanaazh and the Pah-Utes. That would be better than dealing with his relatives at T’o Tlakai, and it was near enough for visiting.

“And we shall see that our children never go to school.” She echoed that, and she longed for them⁠—his children. But the thought gave her pause. Now that she was thinking as true as she knew how, for her salvation, she wondered if she still could have a child. She was young, but she had been through a lot. After that one terrible time, instructed by the prostitutes of Oñate, she had never put herself in danger of it⁠—or had she? She cast back carefully in her mind; she was not sure. It was possible that she could, possible that she could not. The thing stared her in the face like a risen corpse.

Then what could she do? Have him take another wife, who would bear them to him. Then in the end he would love that other. He would not, of himself, ever want her to go away, but that other would scheme against her, the mother of his children. What would there be in the world for her, a barren Indian, having lost Laughing Boy? An unlocked door in a street by the railroad track, or death. Only death.

There must be children. After all, she was only frightening herself with a chance. When she was quite well, and rested, in their new home, she would put it to the test, and it would come out all right. So she was grave and very tender.