"Fearing it might be some signal of lurking savages, Mr. Estill and myself ran with the herder to the bluff which overlooks the house on the north, and saw a sight that was full of mystery; and which, in fact, was never explained.
"There were two large blue lights, of such an unnatural color and appearance as to attract instant attention, flitting about up the valley. They would seem to skim along in long, undulating swells, like the flight of swallows, often rising hundreds of feet in the air, but always darting back to the base of the butte. We were relieved to know it was not Indians, and thinking it was one of those gaseous or igneous phenomena peculiar to water-courses, we did not investigate further, but only regarded their appearance with curiosity.
"Their visits finally reached our premises, and I was horrified to see them hovering about the house later in the season; but all our attempts to approach them were frustrated, for they would recede as we advanced; then we really began to feel how very unaccountable they were, and became perplexed with the mystery. This state of affairs continued until Christmas eve, 1852. As I was standing at a window with Hugh in my arms, I saw the two lights come flitting down the valley together. When they reached a point close to the house they halted, and, after hovering about together for a while, the larger light darted off eastward, and was never seen again. The lesser one remained flitting about the house, or to and fro between here and Antelope Butte. Until, one night in May, 1854, the light, after hovering near by, disappeared forever. _That very night Mora was born._ Seeing a resemblance in her childish face to that within the locket--a likeness that has increased with her age, until now she is the very image of poor, dead Ivarene--we named her Morelia (shortened to Mora by her friends), a name that was engraved and set with rubies upon the locket. We thought this the name, of course, of the female face within the locket, but from the Journal of Ivarene it is apparent that it was the name of her dead mother instead.
"This precious locket had been flung at my feet by Olin Estill, a renegade nephew of my husband, whom he had discarded on account of his vicious tendencies, and who had been leading a mysterious existence, connected, I now fear, with a band of outlaws that committed the massacre at the corral. He had been absent from our house several months, until the day after our return he suddenly appeared at the tent-door, and, after glaring at me a moment, had flung the locket at my feet, then, with a blood-chilling shriek, had fled away. We never saw him alive after that day; but his skeleton, torn asunder by wolves and barely recognizable, was found months after, and buried upon a hill-top near here."