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“Devils they may have been,” said the Navajo, “but they did not say their prayers to a yellow cat, O Kabeyde.”

“I speak but as the People of the Cliffs,” said Moke-icha soothingly. “If they called to Dine devils, doubtless they had reason; and if they made prayers and images to me, it was not without a reason: not without good reason.” Her tail bristled a little as it curled at the tip like a snake. Deep yellow glints swam at the backs of her half-shut eyes.

“It was because of the Dine, who were not friendly to the Queres, that the towns were built as you see, with the solid outer wall and the doors all opening on a court, at the foot of the cliff. It was hot and quiet there with always something friendly going on, children tumbling about among the dogs and the turkeys, an old man rattling a gourd and singing the evil away from his eyes, or the plump, plump of the mealing-stone from the doorways. Now and then a maiden going by, with a tray of her best cooking which she carried to her young man as a sign that she had accepted him, would throw me a morsel, and at evenings the priests would come out of the kivas and strike with a clapper of deer’s shoulder on a flint gong to call the people to the dancing-places.”

The children turned to look once more at the narrow rift of Ty-uonyi as it opened from the canon of the Rio Grande between two basalt columns to allow the sparkling Rito to pass where barely two men could walk abreast. Back from the stream the pale amber cliffs swept in smooth laps and folds like ribbons. Crowded against its sheer northern face the irregularly terraced heaps of the communal houses looked little as ant heaps at the foot of a garden wall. Tiers and tiers of the T-shaped openings of the cave dwellings spotted the smooth cliff, but along the single two-mile street, except for an occasional obscure doorway, ran the blank, mud-plastered wall of the kivas.

Where the floor of the canon widened, the water of the Rito was led out in tiny dikes and ditches to water the garden patches. A bowshot on the opposite side rose the high south wall, wind and rain washed into tents and pinnacles, spotted with pale scrub and blood-red flowers of nopal. Trails spidered up its broken steep, and were lost in the cloud-drift or dipped out of sight over the edge of the timbered mesa.

“We would go over the trail to hunt,” said Moke-icha. “There were no buffaloes, but blacktail and mule deer that fattened on the bunch grass, and bands of pronghorn flashing their white rumps. Quail ran in droves and rose among the mesas like young thunder.

“That was my cave,” said the Puma, nodding toward a hole high up like a speck on the five-hundred-foot cliff, close up under the great ceremonial Cave which was painted with the sign of the Morning and the Evening Star, and the round, bright House of the Sun Father. “But at first I slept in the kiva with Tse-tse-yote. Speaking of devils–there was no one who had the making of a livelier devil in him than my young master. Slim as an arrow, he would come up from his morning dip in the Rito, glittering like the dark stone of which knives are made, and his hair in the sun gave back the light like a raven. And there was no man’s way of walking or standing, nor any cry of bird or beast, that he could not slip into as easily as a snake slips into a shadow. He would never mock when he was asked, but let him alone, and some evening, when the people smoked and rested, he would come stepping across the court in the likeness of some young man whose maiden had just smiled on him. Or if some hunter prided himself too openly on a buck he had killed, the first thing he knew there would be Tse-tse-yote walking like an ancient spavined wether prodded by a blunt arrow, until the whole court roared with laughter.