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Suddenly he leaned forward excitedly and tapped the glass with a long finger: "That's him! That's the guy," he whispered excitedly as another train drew in and passengers began to hurry down the platform and across to the waiting sleeper. "Are you sure?" "Sartin!" "You mean the one with the coat over his arm, and the two men behind?" He stopped short with an exclamation. Bi looked up cunningly.
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.
Then followed a time that was hell worse than fire, for fire would have given merciful death agony under which his physical being began spasmodically to jerk and retch and his eyeballs turned and his breast caved in. A cry rang through the roar in his ears. "Bi Nai! Bi Nai!" His fading sight seemed to shade round the dark face of Nas Ta Bega.
"Must be somepin' doin'. Don't know when Bi's been away." "He went up to town this mornin' early," volunteered Dunc Withers. "Reckon he was thirsty. Guess he'll be back on the evenin' train. That's her comin' in now." "Bars all closed in the city," chuckled the chief. "Won't get much comfort there." "You bet Bi knows some place to get it. He won't come home thirsty, that's sure."
The Navajo will call his white friend Bi Nai brother," said Nas Ta Bega, and he spoke haltingly, not as if words were hard to find, but strange to speak. "I was stolen from my mother's hogan and taken to California. They kept me ten years in a mission at San Bernardino and four years in a school. They said my color and my hair were all that was left of the Indian in me.
They took Bi and put him on the Varsity, and forty-'leven coaches stood over his defenseless form and hammered football into him for eight solid hours on Wednesday and Thursday. And Bi took it all like a little woolly lamb, without a bleat. But it just made you sick to think what was going to happen to Bi when Jordan got to work on him!
Abijah Gage looked after him with twinkling eyes of dry mirth, and slowly sauntered after him, watching him until he entered the little unpainted gate of the Carson house and tapped at the old gray door. Then Bi lunged across the street and entered a path that ran along the railroad track for a few rods, curving suddenly into a stretch of vacant lots.
Bi had played one year in the freshwater college at left tackle and knew a touchdown from a nose-guard, and that was about all. Bi was for refusing to have anything to do with football at first; said he was head-over-ears in study and hadn't the time. But they told him all about his Duty to his College and Every Man into the Breach, and he relented. Bi was terribly good-natured.
"Haven't any idea," replied Shefford, curiously. "We were sitting beside the fire. I saw you walking under the cedars. You seemed thoughtful. That keen Indian watched you, and he said to me in Navajo, 'Bi Nai has lost his God. He has come far to find a wife. Nas Ta Bega is his brother.... He meant he'll find both God and wife for you.
"Is it because of of Glen Naspa?" inquired Shefford. Nas Ta Bega stalked on, still silent, but Shefford divined that, although his service to Glen Naspa would never be forgotten, still it was not wholly responsible for the Indian's subtle sympathy. "Bi Nai!
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