But the visionary terror had scarcely gone when a real one came. Coronado
appeared--Coronado, the descendant of the great Vasquez--Coronado, whom
the Moquis would destroy if they heard his name--of whom they would not
leave two limbs or two fingers together. From her dormitory she saw him
walk into the main room of the house in his airiest and cheeriest manner,
bowing and smiling to right, bowing and smiling to left, winning Moqui
hearts in a moment, a charmer of a Coronado. He shook hands with the
chief; he shook hands with all the head men; next a hand to Thurstane and
another to Glover. Mrs. Stanley heard him addressed as Coronado; she
looked to see him scattered in rags on the floor; she tried to muster
courage to rush to his rescue.
There was no outcry of rage at the sound of the fatal name, and she could
not perceive that a Moqui countenance smiled the less for it.
Coronado produced a pipe, filled it, lighted it, and handed it to the
chief. That dignitary took it, bowed gravely to each of the four points of
the compass, exhaled a few whiffs, and passed it to his next blanketed
neighbor, who likewise saluted the four cardinal points, smoked a little,
and sent it on. Mrs. Stanley drew a sigh of relief; the pipe of peace had
been used, and there would be no bloodshed; she saw the whole bearing of
her favorite's audacious manoeuvre at a glance.
Coronado now glided into the obscure room where she and Clara were sitting
on their blankets and skins. He kissed his hand to the one and the other,
and rolled out some melodious congratulations.
"You reckless creature!" whispered Aunt Maria. "How dared you come up
here?"
"Why so?" asked the Mexican, for once puzzled.
"Your name! Your ancestor!"
"Ah!!" and Coronado smiled mysteriously. "There is no danger. We are under
the protection of the American eagle. Moreover, hospitalities have been
interchanged."
Next the experiences of the last twenty-four hours, first Mrs. Stanley's
version and then Coronado's, were related. He had little to tell: there
had been a quiet night and much slumber; the Moquis had stood guard and
been every way friendly; the Apaches had left the valley and gone to parts
unknown.
The truth is that he had slept more than half of the time. Journeying,
fighting, watching, and anxiety had exhausted him as well as every one
else, and enabled him to plunge into slumber with a delicious
consciousness of it as a restorative and a luxury.
Now that he was himself again, he wondered at what he had been. For two
days he had faced death, fighting like a legionary or a knight-errant, and
in short playing the hero. What was there in his nature, or what had there
been in his selfish and lazy life, that was akin to such fine frenzies? As
he remembered it all, he hardly knew himself for the same old Coronado.
Well, being safe again, he was a devoted lover again, and he must get on
with his courtship. Considering that Clara and Thurstane, if left much
together here in the pueblo, might lead each other into the temptation of
a betrothal, he decided that he must be at hand to prevent such a
catastrophe, and so here he was. Presently he began to talk to the girl in
Spanish; then he begged the aunt's pardon for speaking what was to her an
unknown tongue; but he had, he said, some family matters for his cousin's
ear; would Mrs. Stanley be so good as to excuse him?
"Certainly," returned that far-sighted woman, guessing what the family
matters might be, and approving them. "By the way, I have something to
do," she added. "I must attend to it immediately."
By this time she remembered all about her nightmare, and she was in a
state of inflammation as to the Moqui religion. If the dream were true, if
the Moquis were in the habit of sacrificing strong-minded women or any
kind of women, she must know it and put a stop to it. Stepping into the
central room, where Thurstane and Glover were smoking with a number of
Indians, she said in her prompt, positive way, "I must look into these
people's religion. Does anybody know whether they have any?"
The Lieutenant had a spark or two of information on the subject. Through
the medium of a Navajo who had strolled into the pueblo, and who spoke a
little Spanish and a good deal of Moqui, he had been catechising the chief
as to manners, customs, etc.
"I understand," he said, "that they have a sacred fire which they never
suffer to go out. They are believed to worship the sun, like the ancient
Aztecs. The sacred fire seems to confirm the suspicion."
"Sacred fire! vestal virgins, too, I suppose! can they be Romans?"
reasoned Aunt Maria, beginning to doubt Prince Madoc.
"The vestal virgins here are old men," replied Ralph, wickedly pleased to
get a joke on the lady.
"Oh! The Moquis are not Romans," decided Mrs Stanley. "Well, what do these
old men do?"
"Keep the fire burning."
"What if it should go out? What would happen?"
"I don't know," responded the sub-acid Thurstane.
"I didn't suppose you did," said Aunt Maria pettishly. "Captain Glover, I
want you to come with me."
Followed by the subservient skipper, she marched to the other end of the
pueblo. There was the mysterious apartment; it was not really a temple,
but a sort of public hall and general lounging place; such rooms exist in
the Spanish-speaking pueblos of Zuni and Laguna, and are there called
_estufas_. The explorers soon discovered that the only entrance into the
estufa was by a trapdoor and a ladder. Now Aunt Maria hated ladders: they
were awkward for skirts, and moreover they made her giddy; so she simply
got on her knees and peeped through the trap-door. But there was a fire
directly below, and there was also a pretty strong smell of pipes of
tobacco, so that she saw nothing and was stifled and disgusted. She sent
Glover down, as people lower a dog into a mine where gases are suspected.
After a brief absence the skipper returned and reported.
"Pooty sizable room. Dark's a pocket 'n' hot's a footstove. Three or four
Injuns talkin' 'n' smokin'. Scrap 'f a fire smoulder'in a kind 'f standee
fireplace without any top."
"That's the sacred fire," said Aunt Maria. "How many old men were watching
it?"
"Didn't see _any_."
"They must have been there. Did you put the fire out?"
"No water handy," explained the prudent Glover.
"You might have--expectorated on it."
"Reckon I didn't miss it," said the skipper, who was a chewer of tobacco
and a dead shot with his juice.
"Of course nothing happened."
"Nary."
"I knew there wouldn't," declared the lady triumphantly. "Well, now let us
go back. We know something about the religion of these people. It is
certainly a very interesting study."
"Didn't appear to me much l'k a temple," ventured Glover. "Sh'd say t'was
a kind 'f gineral smokin' room 'n' jawin' place. Git together there 'n'
talk crops 'n' 'lections 'n' the like."
"You must be mistaken," decided Aunt Maria. "There was the sacred fire."
She now led the willing captain (for he was as inquisitive as a monkey) on
a round of visits to the houses of the Moquis. She poked smiling through
their kitchens and bedrooms, and gained more information than might have
been expected concerning their spinning and weaving, cheerfully spending
ten minutes in signs to obtain a single idea.
"Never shear their sheep till they are dead!" she exclaimed when that fact
had been gestured into her understanding. "Absurd! There's another
specimen of masculine stupidity. I'll warrant you, if the women had the
management of things, the good-for-nothing brutes would be sheared every
day."
"Jest as they be to hum," slily suggested Glover, who knew better.
"Certainly," said Aunt Maria, aware that cows were milked daily.
The Moquis were very hospitable; they absolutely petted the strangers. At
nearly every house presents were offered, such as gourds full of corn,
strings of dried peaches, guavas as big as pomegranates, or bundles of the
edible wrapping paper, all of which Aunt Maria declined with magnanimous
waves of the hand and copious smiles. Curious and amiable faces peeped at
the visitors from the landings and doorways.
"How mild and good they all look!" said Aunt Maria. "They put me in mind
somehow of Shenstone's pastorals. How humanizing a pastoral life is, to be
sure! On the whole, I admire their way of not shearing their sheep alive.
It isn't stupidity, but goodness of heart. A most amiable people!"
"Jest so," assented Glover. "How it must go ag'in the grain with 'em to
take a skelp when it comes in the way of dooty! A man oughter feel willin'
to be skelped by sech tender-hearted critters."
"Pshaw!" said Aunt Maria. "I don't believe they ever scalp anybody--unless
it is in self-defence."
"Dessay. Them fellers that went down to fight the Apaches was painted up's
savage's meat-axes. Probably though 'twas to use up some 'f their paint
that was a wastin'. Equinomical, I sh'd say."
Mrs. Stanley did not see her way clear to comment either upon the fact or
the inference. There were times when she did not understand Glover, and
this was one of the times. He had queer twistical ways of reasoning which
often proved the contrary of what he seemed to want to prove; and she had
concluded that he was a dark-minded man who did not always know what he
was driving at; at all events, a man not invariably comprehensible by
clear intellects.
Her attention was presently engaged by a stir in the pueblo. Great things
were evidently at hand; some spectacle was on the point of presentation;
what was it? Aunt Maria guessed marriage, and Captain Glover guessed a
war-dance; but they had no argument, for the skipper gave in. Meantime the
Moquis, men, women, and children, all dressed in their gayest raiment,
were gathering in groups on the landings and in the square. Presently
there was a crowd, a thousand or fifteen hundred strong; at last appeared
the victims, the performers, or whatever they were.
"Dear me!" murmured Aunt Maria. "Twenty weddings at once! I hope divorce
is frequent."
Twenty men and twenty women advanced to the centre of the plaza in double
file and faced each other.
The dance began; the performers furnished their own music; each rolled out
a deep _aw aw aw_ under his visor.
"Sounds like a swarm of the biggest kind of blue-bottle flies inside the
biggest kind 'f a sugar hogset," was Glover's description.
The movement was as monotonous as the melody. The men and women faced each
other without changing positions; there was an alternate lifting of the
feet, in time with the _aw aw_ and the rattling of the gourds; now and
then there was a simultaneous about face.
After a while, open ranks; then rugs and blankets were brought; the
maidens sat down and the men danced at them; trot trot, aw aw, and rattle
rattle.
Every third girl now received a large empty gourd, a grooved board, and
the dry shoulder-bone of a sheep. Laying the board on the gourd, she drew
the bone sharply across the edges of the wood, thus producing a sound like
a watchman's rattle.
They danced once on each side of the square; then retired to a house and
rested fifteen minutes; then recommenced their trot. Meanwhile maidens
with large baskets ran about among the spectators, distributing meat,
roasted ears of corn, sheets of bread, and guavas.
So the gayety went on until the sun and the visitors alike withdrew.
"After all, I think it is more interesting than our marriages," declared
Aunt Maria. "I wonder if we ought to make presents to the wedded couples.
There are a good many of them."
She was quite amazed when she learned that this was not a wedding, but a
rain-dance, and that the maidens whom she had admired were boys dressed up
in female raiment, the customs of the Moquis not allowing women to take
part in public spectacles.
"What exquisite delicacy!" was her consolatory comment. "Well, well, this
is the golden age, truly."
When further informed that in marriage among the Moquis it is woman who
takes the initiative, the girl pointing out the young man of her heart and
the girl's father making the offer, which is never refused, Mrs. Stanley
almost shed tears of gratification. Here was something like woman's
rights; here was a flash of the glorious dawn of equality between the
sexes; for when she talked of equality she meant female preëminence.
"And divorces?" she eagerly asked.
"They are at the pleasure of the parties," explained Thurstane, who had
been catechising the chief at great length through his Navajo.
"And who, in case of a divorce, cares for the children?"
"The grandparents."
Aunt Maria came near clapping her hands. This was better than Connecticut
or Indiana. A woman here might successively marry all the men whom she
might successively fancy, and thus enjoy a perpetual gush of the
affections and an unruffled current of happiness.
To such extreme views had this excellent creature been led by brooding
over what she called the wrongs of her sex and the legal tyranny of the
other.
But we must return to Coronado and Clara. The man had come up to the
pueblo on purpose to have a plain talk with the girl and learn exactly
what she meant to do with him. It was now more than a week since he had
offered himself, and in that time she had made no sign which indicated her
purpose. He had looked at her and sighed at her without getting a response
of any sort. This could not go on; he must know how she felt towards him;
he must know how much, she cared for Thurstane. How else could he decide
what to do with her and with _him_?
Thus, while the other members of the party were watching the Moqui dances,
Coronado and Clara were talking matters of the heart, and were deciding,
unawares to her, questions of life and death.