Jean stood in the middle of the room and listened. “Br-r-r!” she shivered--and one could not blame her. “I wonder if she'd be mad,” she drawled, “if I went out and told her to shut up. It sounds as if somebody was dead, or going to die or something. Like Lite says your dog will howl if anything--” “Oh, for pity sake!” Rosemary pushed her into the living room with make-believe savageness. “I've heard her and Luck sing that last winter. And there's a kind of a teetery dance that goes with it. It's supposed to be a mourning song, as Luck explains it. But don't pay any attention to her at all. She just does it to get on our nerves. It'd tickle her to death if she thought it made us nervous.” “And now the dog is joining in on the chorus! I must say they're a cheerful pair to have around the house. And I know one thing--if they keep that up much longer, I'll either get out there with a gun, or saddle up and follow the boys.” “They'd tease us to death, Jean, if we let Annie run us out.” “It's run or be run,” Jean retorted irritatedly. “I wanted to write poetry today--I thought of an awfully striking sentence about the--for heaven's sake, where's a shotgun?” “Jean, you wouldn't!” Rosemary, I may here explain, was very femininely afraid of guns. “She'd--why, there's no telling WHAT she might do! Luck says she carries a knife.” “What if she does? She ought to carry a few bird-shot, too. She's got nothing to mourn about--nobody's died, has there? “Hiu-hiu-hia-a-a,ah! Hia-a-a-a-ah!” wailed Annie-Many-Ponies in her tent, because she would never again look upon the face of Wagalexa Conka--or if she did it would be to see his anger blaze and burn her heart to ashes. To her it was as though death sat beside her; the death of Wagalexa Conka's friendship for her. She forgot his harshness because he thought her disobedient and wicked. She forgot that she loved Ramon Chavez, and that he was rich and would give her a fine home and much love. She forgot everything but that she had sworn an oath and that she must keep it though it killed faith and kindness and friendship as with a knife. So she wailed, in high-keyed, minor chanting unearthly in its primitive inarticulateness of sorrow, the chant of the Omaha mourning song. So had her tribe wailed in the olden days when warriors returned to the villages and told of their dead. So had her mother wailed when the Great Spirit took away her first man-child. So had the squaws wailed in their tepees since the land was young. And the little black dog, sitting on his haunches before her door, pointed his moist nose into the sunlight and howled in mournful sympathy.