the Bow. 'Go out with the light to-morrow to hunt and return with it,
bringing your kill, that I may see how much you can do for my sake.'
"But long before light the girl would go out herself as a puma and scare
the game away. Thus it happened every time that the young man would
return at evening empty-handed, or he would be so mortified that he did
not return at all, and the girl's parents would send the bundle back to
him. The Chief Priest and his wife began to be uneasy lest their
daughter should never marry at all.
"Finally Ho-tai of the pueblo of Matsaki heard of her, and said to his
mother, 'That is the wife for me.'
"'_Shoom_!' said his mother; 'what have you to offer her?' for they were
very poor.
"'_Shoom_ yourself!' said Ho-tai. 'He that is poor in spirit as well as
in appearance, is poor indeed. It is plain she is not looking for a
bundle, but for a man.' So he took what presents he had to the house of
the Chief Priest of the Bow, and everything went as usual; except that
when Ho-tai asked them to help him in, the Chief Priest said, 'Be
yourself within,' for he was growing tired of courtings that came to
nothing. But when Ho-tai came cheerfully down the ladder with his gift,
the girl's heart was touched, for he was a fine gold color like a full
moon, and his high heart gave him a proud way of walking. So when she
had said, 'Only possibly you love me, but that I may know what manner of
husband I am getting, I pray you hunt for me one day,' and when they had
bidden each other 'wait happily until the morning,' she went out as a
puma and searched the hills for game that she might drive toward the
young man, instead of away from him. But because she could not take her
eyes off of him, she was not so careful as she should be not to let him
see her. Then she went home and put on all her best clothes, the white
buckskins, the turquoises and silver bracelets, and waited. At evening,
Ho-tai, the Two-Hearted, came with a fine buck on his shoulders, and a
stiff face. Without a word he gave the buck to the Priest's wife and
turned away, '_Hai_',' said the mother, 'when a young man wins a girl he
is permitted to say a few words to her!'--for she was pleased to think
that her daughter had got a husband at last.
"'I did not kill the buck by myself,' said Ho-tai; and he went off to
find the Chief Priest and tell him that he could not marry his daughter.
Flower-of-the-Maguey, who was in her room all this time peeking through
the curtain, took a water jar and went down to the spring where Ho-tai
could not help but pass her on his way back to his own village.
"'I did not bring back your bundle,' she said when she saw him; 'what is
a bundle to a woman when she has found a man?'
"Then his two hearts were sore in him, for she was lovely past all
naming. 'I do not take what I cannot win by my own labor,' said he;
'there was a puma drove up the game for me.'
"'Who knows,' said she, 'but Those Above sent it to try if you were
honest or a braggart?' After which he began to feel differently. And in
due course they were married, and Ho-tai came to live in the house of
the Chief Priest at Hawikuh, for her parents could not think of
parting with her,
"They were very happy," said the Condor, "for she was wisely slow as
well as beautiful, and she eased him of the struggle of his two hearts,
one against the other, and rested in her life as a woman."
"Does that mean she wasn't a puma any more?" asked Dorcas Jane.
The Condor nodded, turning over the Zuñi words in his mind for just the
right phrase. "Understanding of all her former states came to her with
the years. There was nothing she dreaded so much as being forced out of
this life into the dust and whirl of Becoming. That is one reason why
she feared and distrusted the Spanish missionaries when they came, as
they did about that time.
"One of her husband's two hearts pulled very strongly toward the
religion of the Spanish Padres. He was of the first that were baptized
by Father Letrado, and served the altar. He was also the first of those
upon whose mind the Padre began to work to persuade him that in taking
the new religion he must wholly give up the old.
"At the end of that trail, a day's journey," said the Condor, indicating
the narrow foot-tread in the sand, which showed from tree to tree of the
dark junipers, and seemed to turn and disappear at every one, "lies the
valley of Shiwina, which is Zuñi.
"It is a narrow valley, watered by a muddy river. Red walls of mesas
shut it in above the dark wood. To the north lies Thunder Mountain,
wall-sided and menacing. Dust devils rise up from the plains and veil
the crags. In the winter there are snows. In the summer great clouds
gather over Shiwina and grow dark with rain. White corn tassels are
waving, blue butterfly maidens flit among the blossoming beans.
"Day and night at midsummer, hardly the priests have their rattles out
of their hands. You hear them calling from the house-tops, and the beat
of bare feet on the dancing places. But the summer after Father Letrado
built his chapel of the Immaculate Virgin at Halona and the chapel and
parish house of the Immaculate Conception at Hawikuh, he set his face
against the Rain Dance, and especially against the Priests of the Rain.
Witchcraft and sorcery he called it, and in Zuñi to be accused of
witchcraft is death.
"The people did not know what to do. They prayed secretly where they
could. The Priests of the Rain went on with their preparations, and the
soldiers of Father Letrado--for he had a small detachment with
him--broke up the dance and profaned the sacred places. Those were hard
days for Ho-tai the Two-Hearted. The gods of the strangers were strong
gods, he said, let the people wait and see what they could do. The white
men had strong Medicine in their guns and their iron shirts and their
long-tailed, smoke-breathing beasts. They did not work as other gods.
Even if there was no rain, the white gods might have another way to save
the people.
"These were the things Father Letrado taught him to say, and the
daughter of the Chief Priest of the Bow feared that his heart would be
quite pulled away from the people of Zuñi. Then she went to her father
the Chief Priest, who was also the keeper of the secret of the Holy
Places of the Sun, and neared the dividing of the ways of life.
"'Let Ho-tai be chosen Keeper in your place,' she said, 'so all shall be
bound together, the Medicine of the white man and the brown.'
"'Be it well,' said the Priest of the Bow, for he was old, and had
respect for his daughter's wisdom. Feeling his feet go from him toward
the Spirit Road, he called together the Priests of the Bow, and
announced to them that Ho-tai would be Keeper in his stead.
"Though Two-Hearted was young for the honor, they did not question it,
for, like his wife, they were jealous of the part of him that was
white--which, for her, there was no becoming--and they thought of this
as a binding together. They were not altogether sure yet that the
Spaniards were not gods, or at the least Surpassing Beings.
"But as the rain did not come and the winter set in cold with a shortage
of corn, more and more they neglected the bowings and the reverences and
the service of the mass. Nights Father Letrado would hear the muffled
beat of the drums in the kivas where the old religion was being
observed, and because it was the only heart open to him, he twisted the
heart of Ho-tai to see if there was not some secret evil, some seed of
witchcraft at the bottom of it which he could pluck out."
"That was great foolishness," said the Road-Runner; "no white man yet
ever got to the bottom of the heart of an Indian."
"True," said the Condor, "but Ho-tai was half white, and the white part
of him answered to the Padre's hand. He was very miserable, and in fact,
nobody was very happy in those days in Hawikuh. Father Martin who passed
there in the moon of the Sun Returning, on his way to establish a
mission among the People of the Coarse Hanging Hair, reported to his
superior that Father Letrado was ripe for martyrdom.
"It came the following Sunday, when only Ho-tai and a few old women came
to mass. Sick at the sound of his own voice echoing in the empty chapel,
the Padre went out to the plaza of the town to scold the people into
services. He was met by the Priests of the Rain with their bows. Being
neither a coward nor a fool, he saw what was before him. Kneeling, he
clasped his arms, still holding the crucifix across his bosom, and they
transfixed him with their arrows.
"They went into the church after that and broke up the altar, and burned
the chapel. A party of bowmen followed the trail of Father Martin,
coming up with him after five days. That night with the help of some of
his own converts, they fell upon and killed him. There was a half-breed
among them, both whose hearts were black. He cut off the good Padre's
hand and scalped him."
"Oh," said Oliver, "I think he ought not to have done that!"
The Condor was thoughtful.
"The hand, no. It had been stretched forth only in kindness. But I think
white men do not understand about scalping. I have heard them talk
sometimes, and I know they do not understand. The scalp was taken in
order that they might have the scalp dance. The dance is to pacify the
spirit of the slain. It adopts and initiates him into the tribe of the
dead, and makes him one with them, so that he will not return as a
spirit and work harm on his slayers. Also it is a notice to the gods of
the enemy that theirs is the stronger god, and to beware. The scalp
dance is a protection to the tribe of the slayer; to omit one of its
observances is to put the tribe in peril of the dead. Thus I have heard;
thus the Old Ones have said. Even Two-Hearted, though he was sad for the
killing, danced for the scalp of Father Martin.
"Immediately it was all over, the Hawikuhkwe began to be afraid. They
gathered up their goods and fled to K'iakime, the Place of the Eagles,
on Thunder Mountain, where they had a stronghold. There were Iron Shirts
at Santa Fé and whole cities of them in the direction of the Salt
Containing Waters. Who knew what vengeance they might take for the
killing of the Padres? The Hawikuhkwe intrenched themselves, and for
nearly two years they waited and practiced their own religion in
their own way.
"Only two of them were unhappy. These were Ho-tai of the two hearts, and
his wife, who had been called Flower-of-the-Maguey. But her unhappiness
was not because the Padres had been killed. She had had her hand in that
business, though only among the women, dropping a word here and there
quietly, as one drops a stone into a deep well. She was unhappy because
she saw that the dead hand of Father Letrado was still heavy on her
husband's heart.
"Not that Ho-tai feared what the soldiers from Santa Fé might do to the
slayer, but what the god of the Padre might do to the whole people. For
Padre Letrado had taught him to read in the Sacred Books, and he knew
that whole cities were burned with fire for their sins. He saw doom
hanging over K'iakime, and his wife could not comfort him. After awhile
it came into his mind that it was his own sin for which the people would
be punished, for the one thing he had kept from the Padre was the secret
of the gold.
"It is true," said the Condor, "that after the Indians had forgotten
them, white men rediscovered many of their sacred places, and many
others that were not known even to the Zuñis. But there is one place on
Thunder Mountain still where gold lies in the ground in lumps like pine
nuts. If Father Letrado could have found it, he would have hammered it
into cups for his altar, and immediately the land would have been
overrun with the Spaniards. And the more Ho-tai thought of it, the more
convinced he was that he should have told him.
"Toward the end of two years when it began to be rumored that soldiers
and new Padres were coming to K'iakime to deal with the killing of
Father Letrado, Ho-tai began to sleep more quietly at night. Then his
wife knew that he had made up his mind to tell, if it seemed necessary
to reconcile the Spaniards to his people, and it was a knife in
her heart.
"It was her husband's honor, and the honor of her father, Chief Priest
of the Bow; and besides, she knew very well that if Ho-tai told, the
Priests of the Bow would kill him. She said to herself that her husband
was sick with the enchantments of the Padres, and she must do what she
could for him. She gave him seeds of forgetfulness."
"Was that a secret too?" asked Dorcas, for the Condor seemed not to
remember that the children were new to that country.
"It was _peyote_. Many know of it now, but in the days of Our Ancients
it was known only to a few Medicine men and women. It is a seed that
when eaten wipes out the past from a man's mind and gives him visions.
In time its influence will wear away, and it must be eaten anew, but if
eaten too often it steals a man's courage and his strength as well as
his memory.
"When she had given her husband a little in his food,
Flower-of-the-Maguey found that he was like a child in her hands.
"'Sleep,' she would say, 'and dream thus, and so,' and that is the way
it would be with him. She wished him to forget both the secret of the
gold in the ground and the fear of the Padres.
"From the time that she heard that the Spaniards were on their way to
K'iakime, she fed him a little _peyote_ every day. To the others it
seemed that his mind walked with Those Above, and they were respectful
of him. That is how Zuñis think of any kind of madness. They were not
sure that the madness had not been sent for just this occasion when they
had need of the gods, and so, as it seemed to them, it proved.
"The Spaniards asked for parley, and the Caciques permitted the Padres
to come up into the council chambers, for they knew that the long gowns
covered no weapons. The Spaniards had learned wisdom, perhaps, and
perhaps they thought Father Letrado somewhat to blame. They asked
nothing but permission to reëstablish their missions, and to have the
man who had scalped Father Martin handed over to them for
Spanish justice.
"They sat around the wall of the kiva, with Ho-tai in his place, hearing
and seeing very little. But the parley was long, and, little by little,
the vision of his own gods which the _peyote_ had given him began to
wear away. One of the Padres rose in his place and began a long speech
about the sin of killing, and especially of killing priests. He quoted
his Sacred Books and talked of the sin in their hearts, and, little by
little, the talk laid hold on the wandering mind of Ho-tai. 'Thus, in
this killing, has the secret evil of your hearts come forth,' said the
Padre, and 'True, He speaks true,' said Ho-tai, upon which the Priests
of the Hawikuhkwe were astonished. They thought their gods spoke through
his madness.
"Then the Padre began to exhort them to give up this evil man in their
midst and rid themselves of the consequences of sin, which he assured
them were most certain and as terrible as they were sure. Then the white
heart of Ho-tai remembered his own anguish, and spoke thickly, as a man
drunk with _peyote_ speaks.
"'He must be given up,' he said. It seemed to them that his voice came
from the under world.
"But there was a great difficulty. The half-breed who had done the
scalping had, at the first rumor of the soldiers coming, taken himself
away. If the Hawikuhkwe said this to the Spaniards, they knew very well
they would not be believed. But the mind of Ho-tai had begun to come
back to him, feebly as from a far journey.
"He remembered that he had done something displeasing to the Padre,
though he did not remember what, and on account of it there was doom
over the valley of the Shiwina. He rose staggering in his place.
"'Evil has been done, and the evil man must be cast out,' he said, and
for the first time the Padres noticed that he was half white. Not one of
them had ever seen the man who scalped Father Letrado, but it was known
that his father had been a soldier. This man was altogether such a one
as they expected. His cheeks were drawn, his hair hung matted over his
reddened eyes, as a man's might, tormented of the spirit. 'I am that
man,' said Ho-tai of the Two Hearts, and the Caciques put their hands
over their mouths with astonishment."
"But they never," cried Oliver,--"they never let him be taken?"
"A life for a life," said the Condor, "that is the law. It was necessary
that the Spaniards be pacified, and the slayer could not be found.
Besides, the people of Hawikuh thought Ho-tai's offer to go in his place
was from the gods. It agrees with all religions that a man may lay down
his life for his people."
"Couldn't his wife do anything?"
"What could she? He went of his own will and by consent of the Caciques.
But she tried what she could. She could give him _peyote_ enough so that
he should remember nothing and feel nothing of what the Spaniards should
do to him. But to do that she had to make friends with one of the
soldiers. She chose one Lujan, who had written his name on the Rock on
the way to K'iakime. By him she sent a cake to Ho-tai, and promised to
meet Lujan when she could slip away from the village unnoticed.
"Between here and Acoma," said the Condor, "is a short cut which may be
traveled on foot, but not on horseback. Returning with Ho-tai, manacled
and fast between two soldiers, the Spaniards meant to take that trail,
and it was there the wife of Ho-tai promised to meet Lujan at the end of
the second day's travel.
"She came in the twilight, hurrying as a puma, for her woman's heart was
too sore to endure her woman's body. Lujan had walked apart from the
camp to wait for her; smiling, he waited. She was still very beautiful,
and he thought she was in love with him. Therefore, when he saw the
long, hurrying stride of a puma in the trail, he thought it a pity so
beautiful a woman should be frightened. The arrow that he sped from his
cross-bow struck in the yellow flanks. 'Well shot,' said Lujan
cheerfully, but his voice was drowned by a scream that was strangely
like a woman's. He remembered it afterward in telling of the
extraordinary thing that had happened to him, for when he went to look,
where the great beast had leaped in air and fallen, there was nothing to
be found there. Nothing.
"If she had been in her form as a woman when he shot her," said the
Condor, "that is what he would have found. But she was a Passing Being,
not taking form from without as we do, of the outward touchings of
things, and her shape of a puma was as mist which vanishes in death as
mist does in the sun. Thus shortens my story."
"Come," said the Road-Runner, understanding that there would be no more
to the Telling. "The Seven Persons are out, and the trail is darkling."
The children looked up and saw the constellation which they knew as the
Dipper, shining in a deep blue heaven. The glow was gone from the high
cliffs of El Morro, and the junipers seemed to draw secretly together.
Without a word they took hands and began to run along the trail after
the Road-Runner.
[Illustration]
XV
HOW THE MEDICINE OF THE ARROWS WAS BROKEN AT REPUBLICAN RIVER; TOLD BY
THE CHIEF OFFICER OF THE DOG SOLDIERS
This is the story the Dog Soldier told Oliver one evening in April, just
after school let out, while the sun was still warm and bright on the
young grass, and yet one somehow did not care about playing. Oliver had
slipped into the Indian room by the west entrance to look at the Dog
Dancers, for the teacher had just told them that our country was to join
the big war which had been going on so long on the other side of the
Atlantic, and the boy was feeling rather excited about it, and
yet solemn.
The teacher had told them about the brave Frenchmen, who had stood up in
the way of the enemy saying, "They shall not pass," and they hadn't. It
made Oliver think of what he had read on the Dog Dancer's card--how in a
desperate fight the officer would stick an arrow or a lance through his
long scarf, where it trailed upon the ground, pinning himself to the
earth until he was dead or his side had won the victory.
Oliver thought that that was exactly the sort of thing that he would do
himself if he were a soldier, and when he read the card over again, he
sat on a bench with his back to the light looking at the Dog Dancers,
and feeling very friendly toward them. It had just occurred to him that
they, too, were Americans, and he liked to think of them as brave and
first-class fighters.
From where he sat he could see quite to the end of the east corridor
which was all of a quarter of a mile away. Nobody moved in it but a
solitary guard, looking small and flat like a toy man at that distance,
and the low sun made black and yellow bars across the floor. In a moment
more, while Oliver was wondering where that woodsy, smoky smell came
from, they were all around him, all the Dog Warriors, of the four
degrees, with their skin-covered lances curved like the beak of the
Thunder Bird, and the rattles of dew-claws that clashed pleasantly
together. Some of them were painted red all over, and some wore tall
headdresses of eagle feathers, and every officer had his trailing scarf
of buckskin worked in patterns of the Sacred Four. Around every neck was
the whistle made of the wing-bone of a turkey, and every man's forehead
glistened with the sweat of his dancing. The smell that Oliver had
noticed was the smoke of their fire and the spring scent of the young
sage. It grew knee-high, pale green along the level tops, stretching
away west to the Backbone-of-the-World, whose snowy tops seemed to float
upon the evening air. Off to the right there was a river dark with
cottonwoods and willows.
"But where are we?" Oliver wished to know, seeing them all pause in
their dancing to notice him in a friendly fashion.
"Cheyenne Country," said one of the oldest Indians. "Over there"--he
pointed to a white thread that dipped and sidled along the easy roll of
the hills--"is the Taos Trail. It joins the Santa Fe at the Rio Grande
and goes north to the Big Muddy. It crosses all the east-flowing rivers
near their source and skirts the Pawnee Country."
"And who are you--Cheyennes or Arapahoes?" Oliver could not be sure,
though their faces and their costumes were familiar.
"Cheyennes _and_ Arapahoes," said the oldest Dog Dancer, easing himself
down to the buffalo robe which one of the rank and file of the warriors
had spread for him. "Camp-mates and allies, though we do not call
ourselves Cheyennes, you know. That is a Sioux name for us,--Red Words,
it means;--what you call foreign-speaking, for the Sioux cannot speak
any language but their own. We call ourselves Tsis-tsis-tas, Our Folk."
He reached back for his pipe which a young man brought him and loosened
his tobacco pouch from his belt, smiling across at Oliver, "Have you
earned your smoke, my son?"
"I'm not allowed," said Oliver, eyeing the great pipe which he was
certain he had seen a few moments before in the Museum case.
"Good, good," said the old Cheyenne; "a youth should not smoke until he
has gathered the bark of the oak."
Oliver looked puzzled and the Dog Warrior smiled broadly, for gathering
oak bark is a poetic Indian way of speaking of a young warrior's
first scalping.
"He means you must not smoke until you have done something to prove you
are a man," explained one of the Arapahoes, who was painted bright red
all over and wore a fringe of scalps under his ceremonial belt. Pipes
came out all around the circle and some one threw a handful of
sweet-grass on the fire.
"What I should like to know," said Oliver, "is why you are called Dog
Dancer?"
The painted man shook his head.
"All I know is that we are picked men, ripe with battles, and the Dog is
our totem. So it has been since the Fathers' Fathers." He blew two puffs
from his pipe straight up, murmuring, "O God, remember us on earth,"
after the fashion of ceremonial smoking.