Soon, refugees from the nearer settlements began to arrive; and then a body of fighting men from up the valley, bedaubed for war. Earth-tongue’s kinsmen merged with them; and as they proceeded south, growing in numbers, they met ever more women and children, and finally those from the point of attack, until, not far away in the cotton-woods, they came upon the men of Sand-back. The enemy were Halchidhoma from far down-stream, they were now informed, not Walapai as at first conjectured. They had avoided the river, traversing the desert to hide in the Walapai mountains and descend at night upon the nearer tip of the Mohave land. They had long since gone off—sixty they were said to number, as they were seen to file over the rocks far above the stream at Pinnacles. They had looted and burnt only the group of houses at Sand-back, killed the woman, and lightly wounded with an arrow one of the men who fought back from a distance: the other reported casualties turned up safe. But the enemy had carried off the woman’s head, and would dance about its skin. Earth-tongue gazed at the collapsed houses, their charred posts smoking on the mass of sand; and that night he watched the beheaded woman’s cremation. There was much talk of retaliation, but an immediate attack would have found the Halchidhoma prepared or perhaps removed.