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TOLD BY THE CORN WOMAN

It was one of those holidays, when there isn’t any school and the Museum is only opened for a few hours in the afternoon, that Dorcas Jane had come into the north gallery of the Indian room where her father was at work mending the radiators. This was about a week after the children’s first adventure on the Buffalo Trail, but it was before the holes had been cut in the Museum wall to let you look straight across the bend in the Colorado and into the Hopi pueblo. Dorcas looked at all the wall cases and wondered how it was the Indians seemed to have so much corn and so many kinds of it, for she had always thought of corn as a civilized sort of thing to have. She sat on a bench against the wall wondering, for the lovely clean stillness of the room encouraged thinking, and the clink of her father’s hammers on the pipes fell presently into the regular tink-tink-a-tink of tortoise-shell rattles, keeping time to the shuffle and beat of bare feet on the dancing-place by the river. The path to it led across a clearing between little hillocks of freshly turned earth, and the high forest overhead was bursting into tiny green darts of growth like flame. The rattles were sewed to the leggings of the women–little yellow and black land-tortoise shells filled with pebbles–who sang as they danced and cut themselves with flints until they bled.

“Oh,” said Dorcas, without waiting to be introduced, “what makes you do that?”

“To make the corn grow,” said the tallest and the handsomest of the women, motioning to the others to leave off their dancing while she answered. “Listen! You can hear the men doing their part.”

From the forest came a sudden wild whoop, followed by the sound of a drum, little and far off like a heart beating. “They are scaring off the enemies of the corn,” said the Corn Woman, for Dorcas could see by her headdress, which was of dried corn tassels dyed in colors, and by a kind of kilt she wore, woven of corn husks, that that was what she represented.

“Oh!” said Dorcas; and then, after a moment, “It sounds as if you were sorry, you know.”

“When the seed corn goes into the ground it dies,” said the Corn Woman; “the tribe might die also if it never came alive again. Also we lament for the Giver-of-the-Corn who died giving.”

“I thought corn just grew,” said Dorcas; “I didn’t know it came from any place.”

“From the People of the Seed, from the Country of Stone Houses. It was bought for us by Given-to-the-Sun. Our people came from the East, from the place where the Earth opened, from the place where the Noise was, where the Mountain thundered…. This is what I have heard; this is what the Old Ones have said,” finished the Corn Woman, as though it were some sort of song.

She looked about to the others as if asking their consent to tell the story. As they nodded, sitting down to loosen their heavy leggings, Dorcas could see that what she had taken to be a shock of last year’s cornstalks, standing in the middle of the dancing-place, was really tied into a rude resemblance to a woman. Around its neck was one of the Indian’s sacred bundles; Dorcas thought it might have something to do with the story, but decided to wait and see.

“There was a trail in those days,” said the Corn Woman, “from the buffalo pastures to the Country of the Stone House. We used to travel it as far as the ledge where there was red earth for face-painting, and to trade with the Blanket People for salt.

“But no farther. Hunting-parties that crossed into Chihuahua returned sometimes; more often they were given to the Sun.–On the tops of the hills where their god-houses were,” explained the Corn Woman seeing that Dorcas was puzzled. “The Sun was their god to them. Every year they gave captives on the hills they built to the Sun.”