She had spoken angrily but now, because her soul sharply resented the
challenge to her happiness which her mother had been making. It was her
own eyes that refused to see the cloud, which the sage and bereaved woman
had seen and conveyed in images and figures of speech natural to the
Indian mind.

"Hai-yai," she said now, with a strange touching sigh breathing in the
words, "you are right, my mother, and a dream is a dream; also, if it be
dreamt three times, then is it to be followed, and it is true. You have
lived long, and your dreams are of the Sun and the Spirit." She shook a
little as she laid her hand on a buckskin coat of her man hanging by the
lodge-door; then she steadied herself again, and gazed earnestly into her
mother's eyes. "Have all your dreams come true, my mother?" she asked
with a hungering heart. "There was the dream that came out of the dark
five times, when your father went against the Crees, and was wounded, and
crawled away into the hills, and all our warriors fled--they were but a
handful, and the Crees like a young forest in number! I went with my
dream, and found him after many days, and it was after that you were
born, my youngest and my last. There was also"--her eyes almost closed,
and the needle and thread she held lay still in her lap--"when two of
your brothers were killed in the drive of the buffalo. Did I not see it
all in my dream, and follow after them to take them to my heart? And
when your sister was carried off, was it not my dream which saw the
trail, so that we brought her back again to die in peace, her eyes seeing
the Lodge whither she was going, open to her, and the Sun, the Father,
giving her light and promise--for she had wounded herself to die that the
thief who stole her should leave her to herself. Behold, my daughter,
these dreams have I had, and others; and I have lived long and have seen
the bright day break into storm, and the herds flee into the far hills
where none could follow, and hunger come, and--"