of your Indians flattened their babies' heads,
and that's worse than wearing corsets."

"Give me an Indian girl's figure for beauty," Ray insisted. "And a girl
with a voice like yours ought to have plenty of lung-action. But you
know my sentiments on that subject. I was going to tell you about the
handsomest thing we ever looted out of those burial mounds. It was on a
woman, too, I regret to say. She was preserved as perfect as any mummy
that ever came out of the pyramids. She had a big string of turquoises
around her neck, and she was wrapped in a fox-fur cloak, lined with
little yellow feathers that must have come off wild canaries. Can you
beat that, now? The fellow that claimed it sold it to a Boston man for a
hundred and fifty dollars."

Thea looked at him admiringly. "Oh, Ray, and didn't you get anything off
her, to remember her by, even? She must have been a princess."

Ray took a wallet from the pocket of the coat that was hanging beside
him, and drew from it a little lump wrapped in worn tissue paper. In a
moment a stone, soft and blue as a robin's egg, lay in the hard palm of
his hand. It was a turquoise, rubbed smooth in the Indian finish, which
is so much more beautiful than the incongruous high polish the white man
gives that tender stone. "I got this from her necklace. See the hole
where the string went through? You know how the Indians drill them? Work
the drill with their teeth. You like it, don't you? They're just right
for you. Blue and yellow are the Swedish colors." Ray looked intently at
her head, bent over his hand, and then gave his whole attention to the
track.

"I'll tell you, Thee," he began after a pause, "I'm going to form a
camping party one of these days and persuade your PADRE to take you and
your mother down to that country, and we'll live in the rock
houses--they're as comfortable as can be--and start the cook fires up in
'em once again. I'll go into the burial mounds and get you more
keepsakes than any girl ever had before." Ray had planned such an
expedition for his wedding journey, and it made his heart thump to see
how Thea's eyes kindled when he talked about it. "I've learned more down
there about what makes history," he went on, "than in all the books I've
ever read. When you sit in the sun and let your heels hang out of a
doorway that drops a thousand feet, ideas come to you. You begin to feel
what the human race has been up against from the beginning. There's
something might