“Your language is not mine,” she replied.
“How is it that you learned my language at the mission school and are not a Christian?”
“They teach all at the mission school,” she said, “and the maidens of the Free-folk are like the other maidens they teach, though the Free-folk when grown are not as town-dwellers are. Therefore they taught me as any townbred girl, not knowing me for what I am.”
“I have the gift of tongues,” she uttered enigmatically, with an odd note of triumph burring the words through her unmoving lips.
Waldo felt a horrid shudder all over him, not only at her uncanny words, but also from mere faintness.
“It is there,” she said, pointing to the doorway of a large tomb just before them.
The wholly open arch admitted them into a fairly spacious interior, cool with the abiding temperaturc of thick masonry. There was no rubbish on the floor. Waldo, relieved to escape the blistering glare outside, seated himself on a block of stone midway between the door and the inner partition-wall, resting his gun-butt on the floor. For the moment he was blinded by the change from the insistent brilliance of the desert morning to the blurred gray light of the interior.
When his sight cleared he looked about and remarked, opposite the door, the ragged hole which laid open the desecrated mausoleum. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness he was so startled that he stood up. It seemed to him that from its four corners the room swarmed with naked children. To his inexperienced conjecture they seemed about two years old, but they moved with the assurance of boys of eight or ten.
“Whose are these children?” he exclaimed.
“All mine,” she replied, a curious suppressed boisterousness in her demeanor.
“But there are twenty of them,” he cried.
“You count badly in the dark,” she told him. “There are fewer.”
“There certainly are a dozen,” he maintained, spinning round as they danced and scampered about.
“The Free-people have large families,” she said.
“But they are all of one age,” Waldo exclaimed, his tongue dry against the roof of his mouth.
She laughed, an unpleasant, mocking laugh, clapping her hands. She was between him and the doorway, and as most of the light came from it he could not see her lips.