Stone Girl turned and made her way toward the stable. At the watering trough she stopped to wash herself as best she could, using her teeth to pull the thorns and sand to reveal thighs and upper parts white under the caked blackness of travel. Her movements were deliberate and with dignity. She knew eyes were watching. If some white man wanted to shoot, she told herself, here she was.

Up in the stable she stood a long time at the door to the stifling room. It was hard to go in. Everything here spoke of Otter Boy. She remembered now the dream she had had in this place of Tiquensukey, the black panther cub. She had played with it in her dream and the claws of Tiquensukey had torn her flesh. She had not understood the dream then. It was not her flesh but her heart, she told herself now, that had been torn. Oh, she knew that the warrior who died in battle went into the next world with merit that set him above those who died in their beds. But Otter Boy was so little. He was not yet old enough to hunt. How would he live in the next world? If Espan or her father or grandfather saw him, they would teach him. But how could he find them among so many who had gone before?

She was still there when Billy called shortly from the stable below.

“There’s a plate down here for you.”

She made no immediate move to go. They had set scraps out to her as to a dog. She would wait, she told herself, till she felt like a dog or had a dog’s hunger. Then the image of Otter Boy rose in her mind and reproved her. For weeks, she remembered, she had fetched his rations out to him on a plate from the kitchen and never once had he refused or reproached her. Quietly she went down and ate sitting on the thick dust of the stable stairs. Afterward she washed the plate at the watering trough and left plate and spoon by the back door of the inn.

Nights that followed she lay awake and listened. Below her the horses moved restlessly in their stalls. From outside came the call of Gokhos, the hoot owl, now near over bare Yengwe fields, now far away over forest and river. His distant voice resembled that of the dog, but no dog ever spoke in such measured tones. She missed the warm little ball of Otter Boy curled up beside her. The days were almost as hard to bear, shut up in this place with everyone else free to go and the sound of their superior voices reaching her.

The moon was in the half round when the summons came. It was Gokhos again, but this time the call rode one of the four winds, ever in the same place. She rose and went quietly down the stable steps thick with the seed of the hay. She had started toward the dark rim of the forest when the lighted windows of the inn drew her. She crept closer for a last look. Her feet made scarcely a sound on the veranda. At the window of the room with the gold chair of curved legs she stopped. Captain Stanton had come home late. She had heard his horse brought into the stable. Now through the glass she saw him and Nan sitting together intimately at a small table where a new girl served them supper. A fire burned in the fireplace. Candles flickered on the white cloth, on table silver, on brass about the warm room, and on the painting of the lady with yellow hair that hung on the wall. The lady’s face seemed almost alive tonight, the eyes sad, peering at Stone Girl through the pane. It was as if they tried to tell her something but the thoughts of white people were hard to understand. Those eyes, she felt, would always haunt her and never would she know what they tried to say.