Chapter 4 - ORIGIN

"But where do you come from? What are you?" he asked again. She did not choose to answer

these questions.

"Is he your enemy?"

"No," he said. "We travel together."

"Then why—" she pointed again to the outstretched figure—"why did you do this to him?

Why did you not let him have his way with me?"

Graydon flushed. The question, with all its subtle implications, cut.

"What do you think I am?" he answered, hotly. "No man lets a thing like that go on!"

She looked at him, curiously. Her face softened. She took a step closer to him. She touched

once more the bruises on her cheek.

"Do you not wonder," she said, "now do you not wonder why I do not call my people to deal

him the punishment he has earned?"

"I do wonder," Graydon's perplexity was frank. "I wonder indeed. Why do you not call

them—if they are close enough to hear?"

"And what would you do were they to come?"

"I would not let them have him—alive," he answered. "Nor me."

"Perhaps," she said, slowly—"perhaps that is why I do not call."

Suddenly she smiled upon him. He took a swift step toward her. She thrust out a warning

hand.

"I am—Sierra," she said. "And I am—Death!"

A chill passed through Graydon. Again he realized the alien beauty of her. Could there be

truth in these legends of the haunted Cordillera? He had never doubted that there was

something real behind the terror of the Indians, the desertion of the arrieros. Was she one of

its spirits, one of its—demons? For an instant the fantasy seemed no fantasy. Then reason

returned. This girl a demon! He laughed.

"Do not laugh," she said. "The death I mean is not such as you who live beyond the high rim

of our hidden land know. Your body may live on—yet it is death and more than death, since

it is changed in—dreadful—ways. And that which tenants your body, that which speaks

through your lips, is changed—in ways more dreadful still! . . . I would not have that death

come to you."

Strange as were her words, Graydon hardly heard them; certainly did not then realize their

meaning, lost as he was in wonder at her beauty.

"How you came by the Messengers, I do not know. How you could have passed unseen by

them, I cannot understand. Nor how you came so far into this forbidden land. Tell me—why

came you here at all?"

"We came from afar," he told her, "on the track of a great treasure of gold and gems; the

treasure of Atahualpa, the Inca. There were certain signs that led us. We lost them. We found

that we, too, were lost. And we wandered here."

"Of Atahualpa or of Incas," the girl said, "I know nothing. Whoever they were, they could

not have come to this place. And their treasure, no matter how great, would have meant nothing to us—to us of Yu-Atlanchi, where treasures are as rocks in the bed of a stream. A grain of sand it would have been, among many—" she paused, then went on, perplexedly,