heat of the plains had already mingled
with the cool hill air; the heights, where Venus kept her love vigil, were
already past. Judith gave Dolly a breathing spell, herself lounging easily
meanwhile. She knew how to take her ease in the saddle as well as any
cow-puncher on the range.

"The Hayoka has dominion over me," she mused, with Indian fatalism. "As
well resign myself to sorrow with dignity. Hayoka, Hayo--ka!" and she began
to croon softly a hymn of propitiation to the Hayoka, the Sioux god of
contrariety. According to the legends, he sat naked and fanned himself in
a Dakota blizzard and huddled, shivering, over a fire in the heat of
summer. Likewise the Hayoka cried for joy and laughed for sorrow.

She remembered how the nuns at Santa Fe had been shocked at her for
praying to Indian gods, and how once she had built a little mound of
stones, which was the Sioux way of making petition, in the shadow of the
statue of the Virgin Mary, and how Sister Angela had scattered the stones
and told her to pray instead to the Blessed Lady. She still prayed to the
Blessed Lady every day; but sometimes, too, she reared little mounds of
stones in the desert when she was very sad and the kinship between her and
the dead gods of her mother's people seemed the closer for their common
sorrow.

Peter, coming up with a much-blown horse, found her still chanting the
Indian song.

"Sing him a verse for me, Judith. Heaven knows I need something to
straighten out my infernal luck. Tell the Hayoka that I'm a good fellow
and need only half a chance. Tell him to prosper my present venture."

She had begun to chant the invocation, then stopped suddenly. "I must not;
you know I am a Catholic." Suspicion that had been scotched, not killed,
raised its head. "What was his present venture?" Her eye had not changed
in expression, nor a tone of her voice, but in her heart was a sickening
distrust for all things.

A belated moon had come up. The level plain, on which their horses threw
grotesque, elongated shadows, was flooded with honey-colored light. Each
straggling clump of sage-brush, whitening bone and bowlder, gleamed
mysterious, ghostly in the radiant flood-tide. They seemed to be riding
through a world that had no kinship with that black, formless void through
which they had groped but yet a little while. Then darkness had been upon
the face of the deep. Now there was a miracle of light such as only the
desert, in its desolation, knows.