VIII
YAHOYA sat very still, half in moonlight, half in shadow, looking steadily at Northrup. He, returning her gaze, could see that in the depths of her eyes there was a light as of an inner fire.
"I wonder," she said softly, "are you Sikangwunuptu, God of the Yellow Dawn? Or are you a mere man, Saxnorthrup?"
It was not a question asked of him but of herself and he made no answer. He had told her already; now she was seeking to decide for herself. Suddenly, with that swift gracefulness which was almost like a liquid flowing, she was upon her feet, her arms thrown out toward him as he rose with her.
"What are you?" she cried, and there was passionate earnestness throbbing through her erect body, thrilling through her clear voice. "You come up like a god—a White God of the underworld! Your hair is like fine threads of gold; your eyes are like such turquoises as they do not find any more in the world, such turquoises as Haruing Wuhti wears upon her throat and arms when the Sun God comes to see how beautiful she is. Your skin where the sun has not blackened it is white like goat's milk, white and soft like Yahoya's own! Why do you come?"
She broke off suddenly. He could hear her breathing. Then, before he could answer, she had gone on impetuously, dropping her arms, moving a little closer to him.
"Do you come seeking a maiden, Yellow Beard? Ishohi! There is no mana here so beautiful as I! Look! Do you come to make my heart leap out of my side for you? It has leaped, quick, without waiting, as the white antelope leaps up when he sees the wolf. If you come seeking a maiden then, Yellow Beard, here am I, Yahoya, maiden and goddess, who will follow you into the desert if you will, or down into the underworld."
She stood so close to him now that it was almost as if he had obeyed the wild impulse upon him and was holding her in his arms. For an instant he felt that one must be more than man or less than man not to yield to her.
But his arms, lifting a little, fell again to his sides. He had one code, had Sax Northrup, and many hard years of seeking to live up to it had made him the man he was. "Accept the chances which the game of life presents, but play the game square!" If ever there was call upon him for fair play it was now.
"Yahoya!" He sought to speak sternly, but his voice was uncertain, catching a little in his throat. "There is moon-madness upon you. You don't know what it is you are saying."
She looked at him with a curious smile, in which were oddly mingled wonder and confidence.
"Must Yahoya twist her lips into lies when her lover comes?" she asked softly. "Must she hide her heart because it loves you, Yellow Beard?"
"You are talking nonsense," he said harshly. "You don't love me and there's no reason why you should. Love doesn't come this way, in a hurry. Just because you are used to Indians about you and I am the first white man"
"You forget Eddie," she dimpled at him, still confident and undisturbed by his words. "I did not love Eddie."
"Thank God for that! But that's no reason you should think you love me. Nor any reason that I should love you."
She laughed at his earnestness.
"Your lips lie well for you, Saxnorthrup. But in your eyes I saw the truth before you hid it. When you lifted your arms a little, like this"
Already did Northrup, thinking of the coming dawn, foresee complication enough without this. Feeling that he must settle this matter while the strength of will was with him, he said in well simulated anger:
"Yahoya, listen to me. I did not come here seeking a maiden. I came looking for gold and turquoises. I have need of them, not of a mana. You do not love me and I do not love you. Do you understand?"
He marveled at the lightning-swift changes which seemed so natural to this girl. In a flash the erect body had grown rigid, the laughing mouth hardened cruelly, the dark eyes were flashing at him as he had seen them flash at old Inaa in a moment of anger.
"So," she said, and her voice was steady and low, but as hard as flint. "So you come but to make mock of me? Is that it? I offer you my love and you push it aside to seize upon gold and cold stones! You dare—you dare make light of Yahoya's love?"
Northrup watched her, uncertain of the answer to make.
"If you are a god," she said in the same cold voice, "I, too, am a goddess; then the time will come when I shall learn how to make you twist your great body in suffering. If you are but a man"
She stooped swiftly, snatching up the prayer-stick from the grass.
"If you are but a man," and she stretched it out over him, "I have but to touch you with this and you wither and die!"
"Try it," he said bluntly. "You might kill a lizard with it; nothing more."
A moment she seemed to hesitate, in deadly earnest, filled with assurance that her curse would annihilate him. Then she dropped the baho to the grass again.
"I think," she said quietly, "that I shall wait until the dawn. That then I shall call and Tiyo and the others at my command will hurl you out from the rocks. And I shall laugh at you while you die horribly, Yellow Beard!"
"I'll plug a dozen of them full of holes first," grunted Northrup, a real anger beginning to grow within him.
God knew he was but seeking to befriend her and that she needed a man to lift a curse from her. And all that he was getting by way of reward was a threat of death.
"Yahoya," he said after the flash of anger, forcing himself to a sane line of thought. "I want to tell you something. Will you listen to me and try to understand?"
Now he was the one supplicating; now there was a note of eager pleading in his voice and she was the one who could deny.
"Yahoya has wasted enough time amusing herself with a new plaything," she said with her quaint little queenly air. "Now she must go and prepare for the bridal ceremony."
She took a step to pass him, but Northrup set himself stubbornly in her path.
"Stand aside!" she commanded him. "Or shall I call for Tiyo and his men?"
"What are you going to do?" he demanded. "Are you going on with this mad wedding?"
"At the dawn," she informed him coolly, "Yahoya will become the bride of the Man of Wisdom. After that she will do what she likes. It may be that she will have Tiyo throw Eddie down the cliffs; it may be that she will become a bride again to Tiyo; it may be that she will have Tiyo throw Yellow Beard down to join the other Bahana! Whatever the Goddess Yahoya wishes done, that thing will be done. And now, will you stand aside for me to pass?"
"No!" snapped Northrup. "You are going to listen to me if I have to hold you while you do it."
"You would lay your hand on Yahoya?"
The wonder at him stood high in her eyes, but back of it was a quick look of admiration. Certainly this man dared much.
"I'll take you across my knee and spank you in a minute!" he told her in mystifying English.
"Are those magic words, Yellow Beard?" she asked quite seriously.
Northrup grinned a little.
"They are very magic words, sometimes," he told her. "They have been known to work wonders with little girls who didn't mind properly. I want to talk with you, about you, Yahoya. Before it is too late."
Perhaps it was his earnestness which held her; perhaps just the curiosity to know what it was he had to say of her. She turned back, again making herself comfortable upon her rug.
"Now," and it was with a sigh of relief that he began, "I want you to tell me again of your coming here. Did Inaa, by any chance, save any of the garments which you wore?"
"I came down from the emptiness of night," she told him. "My robe was built of moonlight and mist."
"It's a wonder you didn't catch cold," he grinned at her, and he thought that she had to fight back an answering smile. "So nothing that you wore has been saved?"
"This only," and her fingers at her throat showed him a glimpse of the gold chain. "This came with me from the moon and is a magic thing."
He put out his hand eagerly for it. It might be that after all she had carried with her through the years a locket which would establish her identity—if he could ever get her out of this!
"Let me look at it."
She shook her head.
"It has never left my throat but the one time for a goldsmith to lengthen it. To take it off would bring evil. But since you are curious, Saxnorthrup, and since it may happen that you will die in a few hours, you may come close and look."
Northrup bent over her, drawing the chain out from under her robe. From the slender chain hung a little locket, plain gold. He found the spring, the locket flew open. Within was the picture of a young woman who, in this light, might have been Yahoya herself. Opposite the picture were some two or three words engraved, a full name he hoped. But he could not make them out.
Well, this was something. If he ever got out and got Yahoya away with him, he'd never rest until he could tell her who she was.
"About the time that you came here," he asked, "do you remember that the body of a white man or woman was found anywhere in the desert? Where they had given out, starving, dying of thirst or a rattle-snake bite? And quite near the spot where you appeared before Inaa?"
"No," she answered, obviously puzzled. "Why do you ask that, Yellow Beard?"
"This is the thing which I wanted to tell you, Yahoya."
There he stopped hesitantly, trying to see just how to go about telling a goddess that she was just a girl in spite of her many years of belief to the contrary.
"A good many years ago," he began slowly, "some people, a man and a woman and a little girl, perhaps, sought to cross the desert. God knows what drove them or lured them. We may never know that, Yahoya, or it may be that we shall find out sometime. At any rate, just before they came this far, they died. Perhaps their water gave out. The man would try to save his water for the woman; she would let her little girl drink and go thirsty herself. So it might happen that both man and woman would die and the little girl live."
He paused again, looking at her to see if she began to understand. She was looking at him intently.
"Go on," she commanded. "The little girl, what became of her?"
"They were white people, Yahoya. The little girl was too little to understand all that had happened. Maybe her mother, dying, or her father, told her to go on toward the cliffs where they had thought they saw a man. The man they saw was Inaa, and the little white girl was—you, Yahoya!"
For a long time she sat still and silent, staring at him in sheer wonder. Yahoya not a goddess! Yahoya a white girl, the daughter of a white man and woman who had perished miserably on the desert!
Northrup, seeing the rise and fall of her breast in the moonlight, the look which had crept into her wide eyes, wondered what tumult of thoughts had seethed into her brain at his words. It did not enter his mind that she would not believe him.
But he had not counted sufficiently upon what a dozen years of training had done for her. She had been very, very little when she had come to the People of the Hidden Spring. Inaa had told her that she was a goddess and had bade his people worship her.
She had heard over and over and over the tale of her coming down through the night from her distant home in the moon; the tale, oft repeated, had grown into fact. She did not remember her father and mother dying of thirst; she thought that she did remember her floating down to earth among the stars which worshiped her as she went by. She had been reared to a belief, a religion, which never a doubt had assailed. A confidence like hers was not to be shaken by the words of the first man who said:
"You are no goddess, but a mortal Bahana!"
"So you dare say to me, Yellow Beard, that Yahoya is no true goddess but an impostor? Is that it?"
"What I have to say is that old Inaa is a scoundrel who has used you for his own purposes," muttered Northrup. "You are a girl, just a girl, and God knows there is nothing more wonderful than that in the world. A girl to whom the going back to the world of her kind will be nothing short of dipping into fairyland."
Yahoya's sudden laughter surprised him.
"Fool!" she called him. "Fool and liar! To think that I would believe such wild tales. It would be well if you remembered that you are but a Bahana, Saxnorthrup, while I am Yahoya."
And he put out no hand now to stop her as she went swiftly toward the stone edifice under the overhanging cliffs.
"Here's a pretty game for a man to play out," he grunted when she was gone. "If she were just plain girl things would be bad enough. But being a goddess to boot"
Here he broke off. Yahoya had left her panther-skin behind her. Northrup rolled up in it and went to sleep.