But the shadow of the pines lengthened until they lay like long fingers across the earth; and still she did not come. Bill Holmes and Luis, secure in the knowledge that Ramon was on guard against any unlooked-for visitors, slept heavily on the crude bunks in the cabin. Birds began twittering animatedly as the beat of the day cooled and they came forth from their shady retreats--and still Annie-Many-Ponies sat on the little hilltop, within easy calling distance of the cabin, and never once looked down that way. Still the little black dog curled at her feet and slept. For all the movement these two made, they might have been of stone; the pine above was more unquiet than they. Ramon, watching her while he smoked many cigarettes, became filled with a vague uneasiness What was she thinking? What did she mean to do? He began to have faint doubts of her coming down to him. He began to be aware of something in her nature that was unlike those other women; something more inflexible, more silent, something that troubled him even while he told himself that she was like all the rest and he would be her master. “Bah! She thinks to play with me, Ramon! Then I will go up and I will show her--she will follow weeping at my heels--like that dog of hers that some day I shall kill!” He got up and threw away his cigarette, glanced within and saw that Bill and Luis still slept, and started up the hill to where that motionless figure sat beneath the pine and kept her face turned from him. It would be better, thought Ramon, to come upon her unawares, and so he went softly and very slowly, placing each foot as carefully as though he were stalking a wild thing of the woods. Annie-Many-Ponies did not hear him coming. All her heart was yearning toward that far away mesa. “Wagalexa Conka--cola!” she whispered, for “cola” is the Sioux word for friend. Aloud she dared not speak the word, lest some tricksy breeze carry it to him and fill him with; anger because she had betrayed his friendship. “Wagalexa Conka--cola! cola!” Friendship that was dead--but she yearned for it the more. And it seemed to her as she whispered, that Wagalexa Conka was very, very near. Her heart felt his nearness, and her eyes softened. The Indian look--the look of her fighting forefathers--drifted slowly from her face as fog, drifts away before the sun. He was near--perhaps he was dead and his spirit had come to take her spirit by the hand and call her cola--friend. If that were so, then she wished that her spirit might go with his spirit, up through all that limitless blue, away and away and away, and never stop, and never tire and never feel anything but friendship like warm, bright sunshine!