Padre Alonzo watched him out of sight before he again addressed the parrot. “I fear thou must mend thy ways, Loretta,” he said. “Here it is Christmas Day, and yet Anzar has no good words for thee. But see,”--he held up a plump hand, displaying one of Gabrielda’s sweet biscuits--“riotous as thou art, I have remembered. And now tell me, what has thou given Tony?” As though in mute answer, the parrot suddenly lowered her head toward him, and he saw that over the grey of her feathered face was a splash of scarlet, as if a vivid fuchsia petal had fallen there. “Loretta!” he cried anxiously; “Loretta! thine eyes!” She lifted her head until her beak pointed past the giant crucifix and straight into the glaring sun. “Buenos días,” he prompted tenderly, alarmed now at her unusual silence and the indifference shown his offering; “Loretta, buenos días.” But she was settling herself upon her cross-like perch as if for the night. “_A-aw, To-o-ny! To-o-ny!_” she returned with a little sleepy croak; “_buenas noches! buenas noches!_” LITTLE WATCHER Picked from among the litter by the slack of his neck, the coyote whelp opened round eyes of greyish amber and blinked into the face of the Old Woman. The Navajo looked back at him, noting with satisfaction that he did not wriggle. Then she put him carefully to one side and leaned over the other cubs, whimpering and crawling about in their shallow burrow like so many helpless puppies. These she caught up, one by one, and gave each a swift flick against a stone. But with the baby she had chosen, she was most tender, holding him tucked in a fold of her bright-striped blanket as she descended the steep trail from the butte. When they came out upon the level below, she made at once toward the goats, which were pasturing at some distance, and from the flock drove a young female, fat, and black as the coal streak that furnished her cooking fires. Still carrying the coyote, she led the goat by a riata to the corral at the foot of the mesa precipice, tied her to a cedar post, and promptly put the whelp up to the udder for his first meal of goat’s milk. He was a wee ball of downy, mouse-coloured fur then, with soft ears, a head shaped like a peach, and a mere wisp of tail. At night, he slept near the Old Woman in the dirt-covered hogan, his bed a square of red flannel on the bottom of a great, olla-like basket which he could neither tip over nor crawl out of. In the daytime, riding in the crook of the aged squaw’s arm, he accompanied her to the desert, where she went to herd, or he lay beneath a brush sun shelter while she worked in the cornfield.