Then it was that Shoz-Dijiji did something the significance of which passed above the head of the white girl, something that would have told her more plainly than words the unique position that she held in the regard of the red man. There, with a woman present, the Apache warrior prepared the game, built the fire and cooked the meal. Wichita Billings took it as a matter of course. Shoz-Dijiji excused it, mentally, upon the ground that white women were helpless fools, that one of them would not know how to build a fire without matches and with very little fuel, how to prepare properly the quail and the rabbit. It was almost dusk when they had finished their frugal meal. There were no dishes to wash, but Shoz-Dijiji carefully buried all signs of their fire and the remnants of their repast. By dark they were moving south again upon the back of the rested Nejeunee. Down the mountains, out onto a plain they rode, and by midnight entered another range farther south. Here Shoz-Dijiji halted again, built a rude shelter for Wichita and told her to sleep, while he threw himself down upon the ground a few yards away. All the following day they rode, through a rough, trailless, mountain country, the brave finding food where there was none to be seen and water where the girl would have sworn no water could exist. Wichita was tired almost to exhaustion, yet the man seemed not to notice that they had been undergoing any hardships whatsoever. To her he seemed a man of iron, and almost as silent; and as the hours passed slowly, monotonously, painfully, there grew within her a sense of trustfulness, of security that she could imagine harboring for no other man she had ever known. He seemed a very well of resourcefulness; a sanctuary as granitic, as eternal as the everlasting bed rock they sometimes crossed—a demi-god moving surely through a world of his own creation where there were no secrets that might be hid from his omniscience. And thus at last they came to the camp of the Be-don-ko-he, but Wichita Billings was no longer afraid; where Shoz-Dijiji was, there was safety. As they rode into the camp, there was a tendency to crowd about them and there were looks in the eyes of some of the squaws that would have filled her with apprehension had not the great shoulders of Shoz-Dijiji loomed so reassuringly close; but after he had spoken to them, in words she could not understand, their attitude changed. Scowling squaws smiled up at her and one or two stroked her skirt in a friendly way, for Shoz-Dijiji had told them that she was his friend—a friend of all the Be-don-ko-he. They dismounted before a rude tepee where squatted a wrinkled man and two women. “This is Geronimo, my father,” said Shoz-Dijiji.