“Bi Nai, long ago you told a story to the trader.  Nas Ta Bega sat before the fire that night.  You did not know he could understand your language.  He listened.  And he learned what brought you to the country of the Indian.  That night he made you his brother. . . .  All his lonely rides into the canyon have been to find the little golden-haired child, the lost girl—­Fay Larkin. . . .  Bi Nai, I have found the girl you wanted for your sweetheart.”

Shefford was bereft of speech.  He could not see steadily, and the last solemn words of the Indian seemed far away.

“Bi Nai, I have found Fay Larkin,” repeated Nas Ta Bega.

“Fay Larkin!” gasped Shefford, shaking his head.  “But—­she’s dead.”

“It would be less sorrow for Bi Nai if she were dead.”

Shefford clutched at the Indian.  There was something terrible to be revealed.  Like an aspen-leaf in the wind he shook all over.  He divined the revelation—­divined the coming blow—­but that was as far as his mind got.

“She’s in there,” said the Indian, pointing toward hall.

“Fay Larkin?” whispered Shefford.

“Yes, Bi Nai.”

“My God!  How do you know?  Oh, I could have seen.  I’ve been blind. . . .  Tell me, Indian.  Which one?”

“Fay Larkin is the Sago Lily.”

. . . . . . . . . .

Shefford strode away into a secluded corner of the Square, where in the shade and quiet of the trees he suffered a storm of heart and mind.  During that short or long time—­he had no idea how long—­the Indian remained with him.  He never lost the feeling of Nas Ta Bega close beside him.  When the period of acute pain left him and some order began to replace the tumult in his mind he felt in Nas Ta Bega the same quality—­silence or strength or help—­that he had learned to feel in the deep canyon and the lofty crags.  He realized then that the Indian was indeed a brother.  And Shefford needed him.  What he had to fight was more fatal than suffering and love—­it was hate rising out of the unsuspected dark gulf of his heart—­the instinct to kill—­the murder in his soul.  Only now did he come to understand Jane Withersteen’s tragic story and the passion of Venters and what had made Lassiter a gun-man.  The desert had transformed Shefford.  The elements had entered into his muscle and bone, into the very fiber of his heart.  Sun, wind, sand, cold, storm, space, stone, the poison cactus, the racking toil, the terrible loneliness—­the iron of the desert man, the cruelty of the desert savage, the wildness of the mustang, the ferocity of hawk and wolf, the bitter struggle of every surviving thing—­these were as if they had been melted and merged together and now made a dark and passionate stream that was his throbbing blood.  He realized what he had become and gloried in it, yet there, looking on with grave and earnest eyes, was his old self, the man of