s thoughts dwelt on the woes she must
have lived through ere he found her:--plainly she could not run unfed
to the hills of his people, and plainly since the storm was meeting
them, the wise time to halt must be ere it swept the valley.

From the well known trail he had departed before the dawn, and the way
they went was a hard way across the heights where earth's heart-fires
had split the land and left great jagged monuments of stone;--and red
ash as if even now scarcely free from the heat of flame.

Into one of the great crevices,--wide, and roofed by rock--he led the
strange maid. Water came from a break in the great grey wall, and sand
had drifted there on the wind, and the girl with a moan that was of
weariness sank down there where the sand was. Tahn-te felt himself
strangely hurt by that moan and wondered that it should be so.

She was only a maid after all, and the little woeful cry made him
think of a hurt child he would have lifted in his arms and carried
home to its mother. But the maid of the bluebird wing was far from
mother and from her people;--no words had they exchanged in the long
trail of the night, he knew not anything but that she spoke Navahu,
and would have him think she wished to be Te-hua.

When she lay so very still that he could not see even the sign of life
in her face, he went close and touched her--and then he saw that the
spirit of her had truly gone on the trail of the twilight--she was no
longer alive as other people are alive.

He lifted her to where the water ran, and with prayer let the cool
drops of the living spring touch her face until the life came back,
and her eyes opened wide with terror at sight of him bending above
her, but he whispered as to a child--"Na-vin (my own)" and then
"K[=a]-ye-povi"--which was to call her the Blossom of the Spirit, the
name had been always with him in the Love-maiden Dream;--and this maid
was the dream come true!

He drew her back from that strange border land of life where the strong
gods of shadow wait;--and then the whisper of the blossom name took the
fear from her dazed eyes--she clung to his hands and in a sort of
breathless joy repeated the name "K[=a]-ye-povi--K[=a]-ye-povi!"--Me!
"K[=a]-ye-povi!"

"You!--Doli--Navahu!"

She nodded assent. "Yes--it is so--now," she said--"but once when
little,"--she made the sign for the height of a child--"Te-hua, not
Navahu--then K[=a]-ye-povi!"

Thus it was Tahn-te found K[=a]-ye-povi after th