Like a Tanagra figurine, Nat-u-ritch stood silhouetted against the golden light of the afternoon. She was small and slender, and her pointed face, in spite of the high cheek-bones, was delicately modelled. The eyes were long, but fuller than the usual beady eyes of the Indian woman. They seemed far too big in proportion to the tiny person whose body was swayed by the stifling breezes that swept over the plains, raising a suffocating cloud or alkali dust. The heavy, embroidered, one-piece gown clung to and slapped against the slight form, wrapping it in lines of beauty. Long, twisted ropes of blue-black hair hung dank and straight on both sides of her face and reached to her knees.
As the wind blew her gown one could see the copper-colored legs, and through the scant sleeves could catch a glimpse of the immature red-bronze arms of the young girl. In her hair a turquoise strand repeated the touch of blue that was woven and interwoven in the beading of her gown. She was standing near the trail that led to Maverick. To the left and to the right the plains stretched into an eternity of space. Nat-u-ritch shaded her eyes with straight, stiffened fingers, and from under the set hands gazed over the country. Towards the west a circular cloud, repeated at intervals, told her that horsemen were making their way to the cow town. From behind a wickyup close to her emerged an Indian chief—heavy, tall, with the sublime dignity of the red man, unimpaired even by the halting, swaying walk that told of his surrender to the white man\'s fire-water.
Quietly Nat-u-ritch watched her father, Tabywana, mount his pinto pony, his flapping scarlet chaps gleaming against the white body of the animal. He looked neither to the right nor left, nor behind him, as Nat-u-ritch followed with her eyes his disappearing form. It was twenty-six miles into Maverick, and she knew she must follow the trail that led there, but she made no movement yet towards departure. Immovable, she stood and watched from under rigid hands an alkali whirlwind swallow up the horse and his rider.
Her brain was busy with the problem that lay before her. For two days Cash Hawkins, the bad man of the adjoining barren land, had been with her father; for two nights Tabywana had drunk from the bottle that the white man had brought to him. Not once for forty-eight hours had her father called her to him, not once had he likened her to the flower of the tree of his love—the spirit-mother. She clinched her long, narrow hands until they tore the fringes of her robe. The pleading, dumb look of her dark eyes gave way to quick defiance; they seemed to become chasms of gloom, unfathomable but determined; they showed the decision and strength of which her resolve was capable.
Her father was to sell that day a large herd of cattle to Cash Hawkins. Intuitively she knew what the two days\' visit from Hawkins would mean for them—despair when her father realized the trick the white man had played on him, scarcity of food and many privations for her, then long weeks of silent suffering for both.
Still she stood staring into the winding, desolate land, the stretching heavens, the stretching plains—both flat, straight, unbroken, like two skies. A world might be above one or under the other. Could this intermediate space of ambient atmosphere lay claim to a life of fact and reality?
But no such thoughts came to Nat-u-ritch as she watched the sandy face of the country. The desert was her home. She had toddled across its burning ground, following, as far as her baby strength would permit, her father\'s pony. In the solitude of the waste land she had grown into womanhood. She knew that to-day\'s dreariness could be broken until the entire place echoed and re-echoed to the life of the men whose cattle thundered at their heels. She had heard the desert answer to the fanatical outburst of her tribes; had seen the white men drive her people farther and farther back. For her and her people it had bee............