ed the
challenge to her happiness which her mother had been making. It was her
own eyes that refused to see the cloud which the sage and bereaved woman
had seen and conveyed in images and figures of speech natural to the
Indian mind.

"_Hai-yai_," she said now, with a strange, touching sigh breathing in the
words, "you are right, my mother, and a dream is a dream; also, if it be
dreamed three times, then is it to be followed, and it is true. You have
lived long, and your dreams are of the Sun and the Spirit." She shook a
little as she laid her hand on a buckskin coat of her man hanging by the
lodge door; then she steadied herself again, and gazed earnestly into her
mother's eyes. "Have all your dreams come true, my mother?" she asked,
with a hungering heart.

"There was the dream that came out of the dark five times, when your
father went against the Crees, and was wounded, and crawled away into the
hills, and all our warriors fled--they were but a handful, and the Crees
like a young forest in number! I went with my dream, and found him after
many days, and it was after that you were born, my youngest and my last.
There was also"--her eyes almost closed, and the needle and thread she
held lay still in her lap--"when two of your brothers were killed in the
drive of the buffalo. Did I not see it all in my dream, and follow after
them to take them to my heart? And when your sister was carried off, was
it not my dream which saw the trail, so that we brought her back again to
die in peace, her eyes seeing the Lodge whither she was going, open to
her, and the Sun, the Father, giving her light and promise--for she had
wounded herself to die that the thief who stole her should leave her to
herself! Behold, my daughter, these dreams have I had, and others; and I
have lived long and have seen the bright day break into storm, and the
herds flee into the far hills where none could follow, and hunger come,
and--"

"_Hai-yo_, see, the birds flying south," said the girl, with a gesture
toward the cloudless sky. "Never since I lived have they gone south so
soon." Again she shuddered slightly, then she spoke slowly: "I also have
dreamed, and I will follow my dream. I dreamed"--she knelt down beside her
mother and rested her hands in her mother's lap--"I dreamed that there was
a wall of hills dark and heavy and far away, and that whenever my eyes
looked at them they burned with tears; and yet I looked and looked, till
my heart was lik