With twenty years of life
behind her, she struggled now for a last few seconds. She stopped
Neewa close to a thick cedar, and as she had done many times
before she commanded him to climb it. Just once her hot tongue
touched his face in a final caress. Then she turned to fight her
last great fight.
Straight into the face of Challoner she dragged herself, and fifty
feet from the spruce she stopped and waited for him, her head
drooped between her shoulders, her sides heaving, her eyes dimming
more and more, until at last she sank down with a great sigh,
barring the trail of their enemy. For a space, it may be, she saw
once more the golden moons and the blazing suns of those twenty
years that were gone; it may be that the soft, sweet music of
spring came to her again, filled with the old, old song of life,
and that Something gracious and painless descended upon her as a
final reward for a glorious motherhood on earth.
When Challoner came up she was dead.
From his hiding place in a crotch of the spruce Neewa looked down
on the first great tragedy of his life, and the advent of man. The
two-legged beast made him cringe deeper into his refuge, and his
little heart was near breaking with the terror that had seized
upon him.
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