want. It seems to me that people who think nothing of paying a hotel twenty-five dollars a day for meals and a place to sleep, will not mind four hundred for the hide. And with the reward that we are to have, that will be six hundred in all, two hundred dollars for each of us. Oh, I never dreamed of having that much money of my very own!” she said.
We went back into the cabin and cooked supper, sure pleased over our good luck. Our Hopi friend came down just before sunset, and we all sat up to the table and ate and talked, and were just plumb happy. Our friend told us more about Grand Canyon and the rich people who visited it. A few of them, he said, seemed to appreciate what a wonderful place it was, but many just said: ‘‘Some cut, isn’t it! Well, I've seen it, anyhow!” And then they would hurry from the rim back to the hotel to talk and eat and smoke and dance. Dancing — silly dancing — was more to them than looking down at that most wonderful sight in all the world. Some of those dancing women wore dresses that cost all of a thousand dollars each; and diamond necklaces and rings worth all the way up to fifty thousand dollars.
And at that Hannah cried out, “Oh, it does n’t seem possible that there are women so rich as that!”
“But it is so” our friend answered. ‘‘And more than that, there is a woman in Philadelphia — I have seen her — she once came to our Carlisle school — who owns over a million dollars worth of diamonds and pearls! ”
“I guess that we may get four hundred for our bear hide,” I said.
“Five hundred, maybe,” said our friend. And we saw that he meant it.
Hannah and I were very happy that night, planning what we should do with all the money that we were soon to have.
Again our Hopi friend and I divided the night watch. Nothing happened. We had an early breakfast, cooked by Hannah, and then, after washing the dishes and packing a pail of lunch, we hurried up the trail, the Hopi to his old men and Hannah and I to the lookout. There had been no wind during the night, so we had hoped to find that the fires were, anyhow partly, under control. Not only were they burning as fiercely as ever; we saw at a glance that two more had been started during the night, both of them between the sawmill and the edge of the desert, and about a mile apart. Our hearts were sure heavy as we looked off at that wicked burning of our forest, and when I reported, at nine o’clock, the Supervisor’s voice had a weary, hopeless sound as he answered: "‘Yes, George, I know just where the new fires are, you need n’t chart ’em. Boy, if we don’t soon get rain we shall lose all this end of the forest!”
“No use asking if the firebugs have been found?” I said.
“No. Don’t ask!” he grimly answered, and rang off.
Shortly before ten o’clock our friend came up on to the crest of the summit, advancing toward us and waving his hands, and we soon met him.
“My old men have taken a liking to you two,” he said. “Only my archaeologist friend, of all the whites, has seen this Rain God ceremony, but just now, just as I was about to ask that you might see it. White Deer told me to come for you. Are n’t you glad?”
Dear, kind old men, my heart goes out to them, to all the Hopi people,” Hannah answered for us.
“Would that all the whites were of the same heart as you!” he said.
We walked on along the crest of the mountain, passed the cave hole, thirty or forty yards down the west slope, and came to a stand. Our friend said that we should there be quite close to the old men when they came up on top from the kiva. We seated ourselves upon some slabs of rock and waited for their coming. Our friend called our attention to Escodilla Mountain, thirty or forty miles to the east at the edge of New Mexico, its long high crest ending abruptly almost at the desert’s edge, and said that the Zuhi Indians went to its summit to pray for rain. Their pueblo in the desert was not more than a hundred miles north and west of the mountain. Hundreds of years back they had lived in the valley of the Little Colorado, and by means of their irrigating ditches had raised fine harvests of corn and other things. And then they, like the Hopi people, had been driven out into the desert by the Apaches and Navajos.
A slight disturbance of the rock caused us to turn suddenly and look the other way, and Hannah and I almost cried out at what we saw: the four old men coming up on to the summit from the cave hole, but apparently old men no more. They came stepping lightly up like so many boys, and, except for their moccasins, and broad-aproned breech clout — blue-black, with red, zigzag stripes, symbol of the lightning — were perfectly naked. Their bodies were painted a dull red.
All in line they came up on to the summit, not fifty yards from us, came to a sudden stop and raised their hands to the sky, and White Deer made a short prayer — to the sky gods, our friend whispered. They then looked down and prayed to the gods of the Under World, and in turn faced the east, the west, the north, and the south, saying a short prayer in each direction. That done, they began to sing, and, oh, what a strange, low, sad song it was. I can’t begin to say how it affected Hannah and me. I saw tears in her eyes, and I think that there were some in mine. Our friend was holding a hand to his eyes, and his lips were moving — in prayer, I thought.
The song ended, and the old men danced to the east to an accompaniment of lighter song, and then to the three other points of the compass, at last sitting down to rest.
“Soon begin their heavy prayers! You shall see! Oh, they are going to pray hard to Rain God,” said our friend.
“Can’t you tell us a little of what they will say?” Hannah asked.
“Yes, a little of it. They will cry to him: ‘O powerful god, have pity upon us, your Hopi people! Look down upon our paintings: see how the short sprouts of corn fade and the leaves of the squash vines droop! O powerful Rain God, spread your cloud-blanket above them, make it leak plentifully down upon them! Soak the earth plentifully with your water, O powerful one, so that our plants shall have full growth! Do this for us soon, powerful one, else our little ones, our women, we ourselves die upon our desert cliffs from want of food!’ There! that is some of the first prayer they will say.”
The old men arose, stood facing the east, and White Deer began the prayer, the others at times joining in it. They then sang for a time, danced, said more prayers, and when almost out of breath, sat down for another rest, and kept looking up in all directions at the sky. All the morning flocks of small, fleecy white clouds had been drifting slowly southwestward, and now they had merged, most of them, into several clouds of great extent, white-edged, dark in the center, and turning darker and drifting ever so slowly around the summit of our mountain, and Mount Ord, close to the west. And presently a flash of lightning leaped from the cloud close above us and just south of the lookout, and then came a loud rumble of thunder. The old men leaped to their feet, raised their hands toward the cloud, and all four went wild with excitement, shouting, singing, praying, dancing, repeatedly raising their hands and then dropping them, fingers down extending, a most suggestive sign for falling rain.
Our friend became as excited as they were. He, too, stared up at the big cloud coming nearer, at other clouds slowly drifting toward it from the east and north, prayed in a voice that became more and more tense, occasionally turning to us and whispering hoarsely:
“Rain God is coming!”
“He has heard our prayers! He accepts our offerings!”
“Oh, my friends! Rain God is good! He is going to water our poor gardens!” This last after another flash of lightning and a peal of thunder almost over our heads.
And at that those old men just about went crazy: they trembled as they cried out their appeals and waved
