The young buck came running out to greet them with a smile of welcome on his bronzed face. “How, white Father Hinch,” he called out, evidently taking the Colonel for Hinchman. He slowed up and walked diffidently toward them, his white cotton shirt, open at the neck, decorated with silver jewelry and his blue cloth leggins gaudy with beadwork. “How, Injun,--where white boy?” demanded Big John, sternly. The youth looked mystified, and then his mobile face took on a lugubrious expression as he broke out into lamentations in unintelligible Navaho. Then, in broken English, reversing his sentences in direct translation from the Navaho--“Oh, White Father--the Dene much, much trouble have!” he cried, addressing the Colonel. “The Black Panther of Dsilyi, he come! Many sheep, he kill! My father that me have done big wrong, he say.” He almost wept, seizing Colonel Colvin’s hand and begging him with pleading eyes to dismount and come at once to their hogan. “This must be that son of old Neyani’s that we heard about at Hinchman’s, boys,” said the Colonel. “We’ll have to get this trouble of the black panther off his chest before we can get anything more out of him concerning Sid. Funny he doesn’t say anything of his being here, though!” “There, boy,--me come from Father Hinchman--me make all right!” he soothed, smiling at the young Navaho. “You Neyani’s son?” “Neyani’s son I _was_,” said the young Navaho, sadly. “That I did wrong he say, and so Dsilyi his panther send. Now I no more son of his, he say!” The Colonel whistled. “There’s superstition for you, Scotty! I’ve heard that the Navaho are the most superstitious of all Indian tribes. We’ll have to handle this with the utmost tact, or there’ll likely be a big row over it. This boy is doomed, unless we can manage to interfere somehow, though. I know Indians! Somehow this freak panther _must_ be explained, and so they have to make someone the scapegoat over it! We’ll ride in and see Neyani. Perhaps we can find out something from him about Sid. It looks to me, though, as if Ruler had followed a Navaho pony here, and fooled us.” They rode to the hogan, slowly. An old squaw was sitting before the partly finished blanket, pulling alternately at the warp sticks and passing little balls of colored yarn through various sheds of its warp strings. The young girl had seated herself on the sand before the hogan and was dipping wool yarns in her dye bowls of red, black and yellow dyes. As they approached she looked at them shyly and then picked up a hank of dry wool and caught the end around the staple on her spindle. Rolling it across her thigh, she drew out the lengths of spun yarn, allowing it to coil itself loose around the spindle as each length was twisted to the proper thickness. “Where Neyani, son?” asked the Colonel after bowing to the squaw and the maiden, who returned his salutations with frightened smiles.